• by Ray Schultz , February 19, 2023

British publisher Reach PLC is exploring the use of ChatGPT in its newspapers, The Daily Mirror and Daily Express. 

The function would not be to write articles, but to support reporters covering such subjects as weather and traffic, Financial Times reports.  

The company has set up a working group to examine these possibilities.  

However, the move has caused concern for the National Union of Journalists, Financial Times adds. 

“I am concerned that the company hasn’t spoken to us in the first place as there’s a potential impact on jobs,” said Chris Morley, the Reach coordinator for the union, according to the report. “We’re going through 200 job losses in the group, it’s been a painful process”

Note: The job losses were not caused by ChatGPT.                                                                      

The Daily Mirror and Daily Express would not be the first periodicals to try Open AI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. 

The experience to date points to problems. 

The CNET team had launched “a test using an internally designed AI engine – not ChatGPT – to help editors create a set of basic explainers around financial services topics,” CNET Editor-In- Chief Connie Guglielmo wrote in blog post.

Someone cited a factual error (“rightly,” Guglielmo admits) and the team performed a full audit. Some stories required “correction, with a small number requiring substantial correction and several stories with minor issues such as incomplete company names, transposed numbers or language that our senior editors viewed as vague,” Guglielmo reports. 

Worse, an AI-driven article in the Arena Group’s Men’s Journal titled, “What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone" was riddled with factual errors.

Bradley Anawalt, the chief of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center, “reviewed the article and told Futurism that it contained “persistent factual mistakes and mischaracterizations of medical science that provide readers with a profoundly warped understanding of health issues,” Futurism reported.