What the Financial Times learned from experimenting with AI

Create content

The first lesson the team learned was humility, as it was unclear whether AI could create news stories that were both informative and engaging.

The AccelerateAI team spent six weeks training a large language model (LLM) and creating a prompt for it to write a newsletter. When the results were not as expected, the newsletter team abandoned it.

“It was the most amazing failure, we learned a lot from it,” Liz Lohn, team leader and chief product officer at the FT, said at the Future of Media Technology conference last Thursday.

Illustration: FT

Extract information

The next experiment was to use AI to extract information from data sets and generate new story leads. They decided to look at stories about the income and expenses of congressmen.

However, the problem with generative AI is that it makes things up (illusions).

“Illusion is a bug in media and a feature in LLM,” Lohn said, adding that AI would work better as an “inspirational” tool rather than a content creation tool.

Sam Gould, head of AI at FT Strategies, sees three clear changes: news is becoming multimodal; audiences are engaging in conversational experiences; automation tools are becoming agents.

Multimodal products

Video is becoming a more popular source of online news, especially among younger audiences. AI-powered tools can now generate text, images, audio, and video, allowing publishers to experiment with different formats and features as part of their internal workflows (transcription, translation, creative analysis, data journalism). All of which involve processing a variety of unstructured data.

One real-world example Gould shared was image analysis from a live report in the field, where AI was able to instantly translate a street sign written in another language.

Gould concludes that AI tools are being tasked with increasingly complex tasks, such as writing code or creating new applications with minimal human intervention.

So, love it or hate it, AI is changing journalism and we must be ready to make the most of the opportunities while minimizing the risks.

Ngoc Anh (according to Journalism)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/nhung-gi-financial-times-hoc-duoc-tu-viec-thu-nghiem-voi-ai-post312736.html