Google is in discussions with news publishers about building and selling artificial intelligence tools that could help reporters and editors produce written journalism, a potential major acceleration of the practice of using automated tools to produce news content.
Media
Google pitches media outlets on AI that could help produce news
Google has been presenting the tools to news outlets since early spring, according to news executives present for meetings or later briefed on them. The product was pitched as possibly being able to collect information as part of newsgathering, write an early draft of a news story, and handle postproduction elements like writing social media posts, according to one executive who sat in on a pitch, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Google suggested that the tool would be most appealing to local publishers.
News outlets are grappling with the latest “generative” AI tools like Bard from Google and ChatGPT from OpenAI that can write human-sounding text on any topic based on simple prompts and questions. Some news publishers have already employed the bots to speed up their ability to write lots of content quickly, spurring anxiety and anger from human writers. But the tools still make up false information and pass it off as factual, something AI experts say is an inherent part of how the technology works, raising doubts whether it can ever be trusted to write news stories.
“We have seen large-language models like ChatGPT and Bard produce factually incorrect information. Unleashing these models in the critical, and often time-crunched, field of journalism seems premature,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of its Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, confirmed the company was in discussions with news outlets with a focus on small publishers. The tools could provide different options for headlines or writing styles, with the goal of speeding up and improving how journalists work, Crider said. She compared the tools to AI features the company is adding to Gmail and Google Docs that automatically write emails, résumés or memos based on short prompts and questions entered by a human.
“Our goal is to give journalists the choice of using these emerging technologies in a way that enhances their work and productivity,” Crider said. “Quite simply these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles.”
The New York Times earlier reported that Google was pitching its AI product to news outlets. The news tool is code-named Genesis, and Google has had discussions with representatives from the Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the Times reported.
Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander declined to comment on whether the Times has had discussions with Google, referring instead to a memo Times Deputy Managing Editor Sam Dolnick and Chief Product Officer Alex Hardiman sent to employees on June 7. “We recognize the power, the potential and, importantly, the risks of generative AI tools both for the public and for journalism,” they wrote. “We also intend to stay at the forefront of identifying creative ways to deploy generative AI to advance our journalistic mission.”
Caitlyn Reuss, a spokesperson for the Journal, declined to comment. Kathy Baird, the chief communications officer of The Post, said, “A meeting took place this spring with Google to showcase their new tech, Genesis, and it included mostly Post executives from the Engineering and Business teams.”
News outlets should be wary of Google, said Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a lobbying group for online news organizations. “The various tools which can be enhanced by AI are exciting and should be explored with an eye on the future,” Kint said. “At the same time, publishers should have their other eye on Google’s long history of harvesting their copyrighted material and their users’ data in a manner that maximizes Google’s own profits and interests.”
The latest crop of generative AI products has sent a shock wave of anxiety through content-producing industries such as art, film, music, marketing and news publishing. The bots, which have been trained on billions of words of text scraped from the open internet, are able to create human-sounding text based on simple prompts.
The generative AI tools are trained on content taken from the news outlets themselves, without payment or permission. A Post analysis of a data set used to train an earlier version of ChatGPT showed that news stories from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Post were major sources of training data for the bot. News outlets are part of a growing movement of content creators who argue that AI companies need to compensate those whose data they use to train their bots.
Last week, the Associated Press agreed to license its news archive to OpenAI in a deal that also gave the news organization access to OpenAI technology. The AP has been among a group of news outlets that have experimented with writing automated articles for years.
Some news organizations have already put chatbots to work writing news articles. In January, internet sleuths revealed the tech news website CNET published dozens of articles written by AI. The stories were littered with errors. One article on compound interest claimed a $10,000 deposit with 3 percent interest would earn the holder $10,300 in the first year of their investment, rather than the actual $300.
Google has a complicated relationship with the news industry. As the company rapidly grew through the first two decades of the 2000s, it gobbled up huge portions of the advertising industry, decimating the news business globally. Local and regional news outlets that relied on classified and local ads for decades saw their revenue crater, and thousands of them have shut down in the United States alone, leaving many towns without a news source beyond social media.
Larger news outlets pivoted toward online subscriptions, trying to avoid relying on an increasingly small share of the advertising market. In June, the largest newspaper chain in the country, Gannett, sued Google, claiming its dominance in digital advertising was further damaging the local news industry.
At the same time, Google search traffic is a lifeline for many news publishers, including ones who have subscription businesses. News outlets compete every day to have their stories show up higher in Google search results. Google has also been accused for years of cannibalizing traffic to news outlets by showing portions of articles directly in search results, a practice the company says helps its users.
For years, Google has tried to improve its reputation among news outlets by giving grants directly to local news and smaller publishers, as well as creating free tools like transcription software for news outlets to use. In some countries, governments are passing laws to require Google and Facebook to pay news producers directly for showing their content or portions of it on their platforms.
In Canada, a new law set to go into effect at the end of the year that forces the two tech giants to make payments to news outlets has become a major political flash point. Google and Facebook have said they would block Canadians from sharing links to news outlets, while the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accused the companies of “bullying tactics.”
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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