How Will Artificial Intelligence Change the News Business?

In early July, the Associated Press made a deal with OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, to license “part of AP’s text archive” and get access to “OpenAI’s technology and product expertise.” A few days later, OpenAI announced a $5 million grant, accompanied by $5 million in software use “credits,” to the American Journalism Project, an organization that supports nonprofit newsrooms. Meanwhile, Google has reportedly been presenting major news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, with a new software “personal assistant” for journalists, code-named Genesis, which promises to “take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content,” with a pitch described by some in attendance as unsettling. A number of news organizations, including G/O media, which owns Gizmodo, Jezebel, and The Onion, are experimenting with blog-style content generated from scratch, and plenty of others, with varying degrees of transparency, have started to dabble.

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