AUSTIN (KXAN) -- KXAN is working to better understand what people think about newsrooms using artificial intelligence in their workflows and is opening up a survey for our viewers to tell us their opinions.
KXAN does not currently use generative AI (see below for a definition) in our newsroom and is working to develop policies surrounding the use of AI tools. Your input will help us shape our own workflows and provide insight to other newsrooms as well.
Trusting News and the Online News Association selected KXAN and 10 other newsrooms for this effort.
"The goal is for these newsrooms to learn what type of AI use community members are comfortable and uncomfortable with while also gaining more insight into how their news consumers want to be notified if AI is used in the journalistic process," an article from Trusting News announcing the cohort explained.
Artificial intelligence tools have been around for a while -- they help power virtual assistants like Apple's Siri or Google's Alexa, enable phones to offer predictive text and create auto-generated captions on YouTube and Facebook. What's new -- and been the center of buzz online recently -- is a branch of AI called generative AI. Generative AI can produce new content in response to prompts.
Simplistically, generative AI works by giving an algorithm a large amount of data -- whether text, image or video -- that it uses as examples of what it should create. Other algorithms guide it to then produce something when asked. Most generative AI tools respond to prompts that users input, and then will output text, images or video. It uses the data it was trained on to produce what it thinks the user is asking for. These outputs have become more sophisticated over the past few years, but they are fallible and may include errors or incorrect information. IBM Research has an overview online of the technology, and other tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini also share some insight into their methodology online.
Tap here to take the online survey, which also includes an option to share your email if you'd be willing to speak with us more in-depth about AI and newsrooms. Thank you for your participation and please email kate.winkle@kxan.com with any questions.
