Extra! Extra! Artificial intelligence is here to stay

If you can remember 30 years ago, you’ll recall naysayers predicting the internet would be just a fad. Boy, they got that wrong.

We’re at a similar point with artificial intelligence. It’s time to accept it’s here to stay and to set the rules around how to use it.

That was one of the takeaways from a conference this week in Charlottetown, P.E.I., where about 85 publishers, editors, producers and philanthropists talked about creating a sustainable future for Canada’s local news organizations, including Nunatsiaq News.

Putting the Local Back in Local News was the theme of a conference hosted by the Rideau Hall Foundation and the Michener Foundation, two philanthropic organizations that support journalism in Canada.

It was eye-opening to learn how many different ways AI can be used by news organizations and how many different ways it’s already being used.

Some publishers and editors reported they use it as a personal assistant for mundane tasks such as summarizing and replying to emails.

Others use it to generate editorial cartoons about local topics, a job they can’t afford to pay an artist to do.

We’re not far from the day when Canadian news organizations might use it to generate articles, especially about softer community news.

Some journalists speculated about using AI to summarize municipal council minutes and generating a report about what councillors talked about.  That could eliminate the need to send a reporter to meetings or the time-consuming task of combing through the minutes afterward.

It could be used to assemble years of government reports and compare the data, pointing out trends that would take a person days and weeks to do.

But just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should. Many journalists were clearly uncomfortable with the idea of turning over the digging that traditionally has been done by a human being.

Because the news is supposed to report what actually happened, many journalists have an aversion to using an artificial intelligence app to conjure up a photo or article out of thin air instead of relying on photographers or reporters to accurately reflect what they really saw and heard.

There are ethical qualms about using a machine to do work that could be done by a person — presumably putting someone out of work.

That’s why there’s an urgency for news organizations to develop their own artificial intelligence policies tailored to how AI would be used in their own particular newsrooms.

As Nunatsiaq News navigates this now-unavoidable development, readers’ suggestions about how to use it and how not to use it are welcomed. (If you have thoughts about AI use, please share them at editors@nunatsiaq.com).

For now, at Nunatsiaq News, our journalism is and has been essentially free of artificial intelligence. Nunatsiaq has been extremely cautious about even considering using it.

Some Nunatsiaq reporters use a form of AI — a service that generates transcripts of the interviews they record. But that’s about it. And, candidly, upon review the results of those transcripts are not always reliable and are frequently disappointing.

At Christmas 2023, this paper published a story about an historian who used AI to generate pictures of what Santa Claus might look like wearing traditional clothing from each territory or province. It was light-hearted holiday fare, but even the idea amplifying someone else’s AI use didn’t feel quite right.

But the time has come to develop a policy on AI use. Ignoring the power of artificial intelligence now would be like those who predicted in 1995 that the internet was going be a passing fad.