Can The New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Rulers?

Yes. I agree with you there.

I’m sure, even though I’ve never done it, that if I look at all the investigative reports that we’ve done, and these are reports that take months, sometimes years of work to produce one story, that it would be very difficult to justify all that money, right?

But I think sometimes people don’t realize how much organizations like ours have the best interests of citizens in mind. I truly believe, as our Founding Fathers did, and in all of their parts, the Founding Fathers agreed that a free people needs a free press and that a self-governing nation needs access to independent and reliable information.

Jefferson famously said, given a choice between a government without a press or a press without a government, he would not hesitate to choose a press. And that’s because this work is very important to people.

Journalism often knows what you know. Moving to AI, it’s how AI knows what it knows.

Yes, let’s get into that. When it comes to AI in journalism, I break two buckets. For WIRED, there are reports about this technology in a timely manner, which is very important. And then there is a different question, although we are also asking, how AI will affect the practice of journalism and the use of journalism.

I mean, there are difficult lines to walk here, and I want to know what you think about The Times.

I guess my philosophy is that you don’t have to be the first in life. There is a risk of jumping too quickly into an emerging technology. And perhaps there is more risk than waiting, watching, learning, learning, quietly experimenting behind the scenes. I think you saw some of the horrors, didn’t you? Like, think about media organizations that, in my opinion very stupidly, decided to hand over all the responsibility of writing and publishing articles to AI. Mistakes were made.

Mistakes were made. And errors were printed.

That’s right. And not only were errors published, but fake news was created. It was a completely predictable and unnecessary mistake. People are responsible for everything we do, period. And there is something about AI that has fooled people into forgetting that it is a tool.

Well, he is very nice to hang out with.

But my friends say, “Well, what if the AI ​​makes a mistake?” I said, “Well, then it’s your job to find that mistake and remove it from your work.” You can’t ask about a computer. What if the computer makes a mistake?

Well, you should get it, right? I see this as a descriptive tool. So we are spending more on reporting than writing, creating, editing.

I think AI is very good at detecting patterns and errors in large datasets. In many ways, that’s a pretty good summary of the main part of the report. You know, the campaign finance report is what happens, how the mix of donors to Republicans and Democrats is changing, big donors to smaller donors, then wrong.