Accept it, all your journalists are using AI

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I was reminded the other day that change can be almost invisible to those who are in the middle of it.

The occasion for this realisation was a visit inspired by my daughter’s history studies to an exhibition about two Indian princesses who were leading lights in the campaign for women’s voting rights in the UK at the start of the last century.

Of course their story was bound up with that of the British empire, which has traditionally been regarded somewhat differently in the UK to the places our forefathers colonised. The exploitation and cruelty have been mostly – mostly – glossed over in the collective British memory.

Until now it seems. The captions in this exhibition were unequivocal. One read: “[Queen Victoria] symbolises the contradictions of British rule in India: an empire that presented itself as liberal and inclusive but was ultimately unequal and unjust.”

The notable thing about this was that the exhibition was held in Kensington Palace, a royal residence. One can assume that everything on display in the palace is vetted by the royal authorities. So an opinion that would probably still cause frothing at Fleet Street tabloids is now that of the King! Almost out of sight, the sun really has set on the old-fashioned view of the “civilising” British empire.

You might ask what this has to do with news. I’ll explain. That same weekend I met with a wise friend who had this to say about AI in publishing. “I think tech people talk positively about AI but resist using it, because they are worried about their jobs; and editorial people are really negative about it, but are secretly using it all the time.”

I think he’s right. This is the invisible change happening in the news industry at the moment.

Journalistic use of AI tends to come to public attention in the trade press, on Twitter and on LinkedIn when some calamity has befallen a hapless reporter – when they don’t check made-up quotes, leave prompts in published text or inadvertently plagiarise others’ work.

What you don’t read about is the journalists who have deployed agents to systematically scour their patch for leads; those who have written prompts to tidy up their first drafts; those who have used AI to analyse huge data sets; those who have built fact-checking GPTs; and on and on.

AI is all around us now, and despite the grumblings in the trade press, on Twitter and on LinkedIn, it is being used by almost everyone, all the time. The use cases are almost endless. Almost all newsrooms are embracing AI on a corporate level – what I’m talking about is its usage by individual journalists, often flying below the radar. A recent survey by Muck Rack reported that 82% of journalists are now using AI in some way or another.

And here I think lies a potential problem. Journalists need to be straightforward with their bosses about where and how they are using AI to help them in their work. Because that way publishers can ensure that they are not using an unauthorised tool, or exposing the company’s data, or risking legal intervention, or any manner of other issues that we might not yet understand.

But to do that they need to know that they can talk about it in a risk-free fashion. If they fear they might lose their job because they found a stretchy use case, they aren’t going to tell you. That will keep AI underground albeit ubiquitous.

So we need to bring this change out into the open. News organisations need to celebrate their AI usage more widely; newsroom teams must talk about their learnings; and, crucially, individual reporters should be encouraged to share their AI tips and tricks with their colleagues.

Then we’ll have a better chance of negotiating this fundamental change to the working and wider world.

Britain famously “lost an empire and has not yet found a role” and I think partly that was partly because it didn’t face up to what happened when it ruled a third of the world … but that’s the subject of a book not an email newsletter. Journalism must not make the same mistake in relation to AI.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]