Share your thoughts in our survey on using AI in the newsroom (GettyImages)
AUSTIN (KXAN) — KXAN is working to better understand how people feel about newsrooms using artificial intelligence in their workflows, and we're conducting a survey to ask our audience what they think.
While KXAN doesn't currently use generative AI (see definition below) in our newsroom, we are working on developing policies for the use of AI tools. Your input will help shape our workflow and provide useful information for other newsrooms.
Trusting News and the Online News Association selected KXAN and 10 other newsrooms for the effort.
“The goal for these newsrooms is to learn what types of AI members are comfortable and uncomfortable with, while at the same time gaining greater insight into how news consumers want to be informed when AI is used in the reporting process,” explained a Trusting News article announcing the cohort.
What is generative AI?
Artificial intelligence tools have been around for a while, helping to power virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Google's Alexa, providing predictive text on our phones, and creating auto-generated subtitles on YouTube and Facebook. One branch of AI that's been making waves online recently is generative AI, which can create new content in response to prompts.
Simply put, generative AI works by feeding an algorithm a large amount of data, such as text, images, or videos, to use as examples of what the algorithm should create. Others guide the algorithm to create something in response to a request. Most generative AI tools respond to prompts entered by the user, outputting text, images, or videos. They use the data they trained on to generate what they believe the user is requesting. While these outputs have become more sophisticated over the past few years, they are fallible and may contain errors or inaccurate information. IBM Research has published an overview of the technology online, and other tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini have also published insights into their methodologies online.
Conduct research
Tap here to take our online survey. You also have the option to share your email address if you'd like to discuss AI and your newsroom in more detail. Thanks for participating! If you have any questions, please email me at kate.winkle@kxan.com.
