Throughout its more than 130-year history, the Financial Times has upheld the highest journalistic standards. As editor of this newspaper, nothing is more important to me than the trust our readers place in the quality journalism we produce. Quality first means accuracy. It also means fairness and transparency.
That’s why today I’m sharing my current thoughts on using generative artificial intelligence in newsrooms.
Generative artificial intelligence is the most important new technology since the advent of the Internet. It is developing at breakneck speed, and its applications and implications are still emerging. Generative AI models learn from vast amounts of published data, including books, publications, Wikipedia, and social media sites, to predict the most likely next word in a sentence.
This innovation is an increasingly important area of reporting for us and I am determined to make the FT a valuable source of AI information and analysis in the years to come. But it also has clear and potentially profound implications for the way journalists and editors go about their day-to-day work, helping us analyze and discover stories. It has the potential to increase productivity and free up journalists and editors to focus on generating and reporting original content.
However, as clear and reasonable as they may seem, the AI models on the market today are ultimately a predictive engine, and they are learning from the past. They can fabricate facts – this is called “illusion” – and make up references and links. If sufficiently manipulated, AI models can produce completely wrong images and articles. They also replicate existing social views, including historical biases.
I firmly believe that our mission to produce journalism of the highest standard is even more important in this age of rapid technological innovation. In a time when misinformation can be generated and spread quickly, and trust in the media generally waning, we at the Financial Times have an even greater responsibility to be transparent, to report the facts and to pursue the truth. That’s why, in the new age of artificial intelligence, FT news will continue to be reported and written by the best minds in their fields, committed to accurately and impartially reporting and analyzing the world as it is.
The FT is also a pioneer in the digital news business, and our business colleagues will use artificial intelligence to serve readers and customers and maintain our track record of effectively innovating. Our newsrooms must also remain centers of innovation. It is important and necessary for the FT to have a team in the newsroom that can responsibly experiment with AI tools to assist journalists with tasks such as mining data, analyzing text and images, and translating. We won’t post realistic images generated by AI, but we will explore the use of AI-enhanced visuals (infographics, charts, photos) and explain this to our readers as we do so. This does not affect the artist’s illustrations for the FT. The team will also always consider generative AI’s ability to summarize, always under human supervision.
We will be transparent both within the FT and with our readers. All newsroom experiments will be documented in internal registers, including where possible with third-party providers who may use the tool. Training our journalists on using generative artificial intelligence to discover stories will be provided through a series of masterclasses.
Each technology opens up new and exciting areas that must be explored responsibly. But as recent history has shown, excitement must be accompanied by the risks of misinformation and the corruption of truth. The FT will remain committed to its fundamental mission and will keep readers informed as generative AI itself and our thinking about it evolve.