Google is testing an artificial intelligence tool that can write news articles, in the latest evidence that the technology has the potential to transform white-collar professions.
The product, known as Genesis, uses AI technology to absorb information such as details of current events and then create news stories. The tool was pitched to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp as a “helpmate”, according to the New York Times.
Google said it was in the early stages of exploring the AI tool, which it said could assist journalists with options for headlines or different writing styles. It stressed that the technology was not intended to replace journalists.
It said: “These tools are not intended to replace the role journalists have in reporting, creating and factchecking their articles. Our goal is to give journalists the choice of using these emerging technologies in a way that enhances their work and productivity, just like we’re making assistive tools available for people in Gmail and in Google Docs.”
Two executives at the New York Times who saw the pitch said it “seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories”.
The paper quoted one person familiar with the product as saying the tool would serve as a “personal assistant for journalists” to automate some tasks, and that Google saw it as an opportunity to help “steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative AI”.
The move comes after OpenAI and the Associated Press made a deal for the the ChatGPT maker to use the news agency’s archive of stories for the purpose of training its AI models, which ingest vast amounts of material in order to produce plausible responses.
In a report last month, the accounting group KPMG estimated that 43% of the tasks performed by authors, writers and translators could be carried out by AI tools. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported last week that major economies were on the “cusp of an AI revolution” that could lead to job losses in skilled professions such as law, medicine and finance.
Apple is testing an AI-powered chatbot that engineers refer to as Apple GPT, according to Bloomberg. The chatbot is understood to have the potential to challenge ChatGPT, but Apple has not released a clear plan on releasing the technology to consumers. The chatbot operates from an AI model called Ajax.
The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, recently said the company was “looking closely” at AI technology.
Peter Welinder, an OpenAI executive, has denied claims that the model underpinning the most advanced version of ChatGPT, a model called GPT-4, is getting “dumber”.
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Welinder said in a tweet that people were becoming such heavy users of it that they were noticing issues they hadn’t seen before. “We haven’t made GPT-4 dumber. Quite the opposite: we make each new version smarter than the previous one,” he said.
Users can check how responses have changed by inputting a previously used prompt from earlier days of ChatGPT and comparing the outputs. One user tweeted: “it generates faster, but the quality seems worse.”
Another wrote on OpenAI’s developer forum: “It’s totally horrible now … It’s braindead vs. before … if you aren’t actually pushing it with what it could do previously, you wouldn’t notice. Yet if you are really using it fully, you see it is obviously much dumber.”
While newsrooms explore the possibility of using AI, an investigation this year by the anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard found bots were already powering dozens of AI-generated content farms.