On December 28, 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that artificial intelligence and the news industry complement each other. Ten years ago, I witnessed the birth of a new era in the news editing room of the Associated Press: news writing using artificial intelligence (AI). Before the rise of AI, it was journalists from the Associated Press, not tech celebrities, who proposed a bold idea: to let machines play the role of editors. Fast forward to today, this once controversial idea is now revolutionary for the Associated Press and many other news organizations. AI has led the Associated Press to expand its quarterly financial coverage from 400 companies to 4000. It can be said that by reporting on the expanding breadth of news and overcoming the limits of human capabilities, AI has reshaped the news industry. Meanwhile, the emergence of advanced big language models is expected to bring about greater changes. In addition to writing reports, they also contribute to in-depth research on big data, quantifying the occurrence of events, and revealing profound insights that have been hidden. By combining with human insight, AI tools can quickly summarize a mountain of documents into precise narratives. The fusion of human intuition and machine accuracy will make the news industry a faster and more analytical industry.
But a key point that many people overlook is that the value of the news industry lies not in what it summarizes, but in what it reveals. It usually relies on conversations with people to obtain first-hand information, sometimes involving dozens or even hundreds of interviews. AI robots can learn public news articles, interviews, and meticulously crafted reports almost without restrictions, and the diligent work of journalists and editors has become the main textbook for AI news writing. There is also a clear implicit contract in this: in order for AI to thrive, the news industry must thrive. Neglecting the health of the news industry not only damages its own future, but may also provide inferior data for AI. This may lay the groundwork for a terrifying pattern collapse. Therefore, in the evolution of AI, the products of human journalism are the real gold. However, as technology giants use AI to mine data, the source of this information - the news industry - often goes unrecognized and unrewarded.
