Text-generating Artificial Intelligences in the Future of Journalism

  • Gyenes Lídia
doi: 10.59648/filologia.2023.1-4.2

Abstract

The article seeks the answer to the question of whether the work of journalists, more specifically news writing, can be automated. Can commercial artificial intelligence, GPT-3 available on the OpenAI interface, be able to generate informative, readable, humanlike articles without the reader noticing or being distracted? In addition to GPT specialised for text generation, I also use Dall-E imaging intelligence for the tests with which I create realistic illustrations to GPT’s writings. At the same time, various journalists also prepare short news stories for the experiment based on the same keywords that I provide for the GPT. I upload the fictional short news generated in this way to a HTML code-based website in equal proportion to the short news of the journalists. After the reader clicks on the news he likes, he receives a questionnaire which provides additional analytical aspects for the experiment. The experiment reveals whether people can subconsciously separate journalistic and machine-written articles. The study discovers whether artificial intelligence can compete with human journalists in terms of writing style, transforming the work of those involved in news writing in the long term.

Keywords:

artificial intelligence GPT-3 Dall-E future journalism automatic newswriting

How to Cite

Gyenes, L. (2024). Text-generating Artificial Intelligences in the Future of Journalism. Filológia.Hu, 14(1–4), 23–50. https://doi.org/10.59648/filologia.2023.1-4.2

References

Atkinson, Robert D. 2016: ’It’s Going to Kill Us!’ and Other Myths About the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Online: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3066182

Bajomi-Lázár Péter 2003: Az objektivitás-doktrína nyomában. Médiakutató 4/2: 13–38.

Caramiaux, Baptiste – Lotte, Fabien – Geurts, Joost 2019: AI in the media and creative industries. [Research Report] New European Media (NEM). Heidelberg. 1–35. Online: https://inria.hal.science/hal-02125504/document

Frankenfield, Jake 2023: The Turing Test: What Is It, What Can Pass It, and Limitations. Investopedia, 2023. július 31. Online: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/turing-test.asp

Johnson, Stephen 2022: The Turing test: AI Still hasn’t Passed the “Imitation Game”. Big Think, 2022. március 7. Online: https://bigthink.com/the-future/turing-testimitation-game/

Kroll, John 2018: Digging deeper into the 5 W’ s of journalism. International Journalists’ Network, 2018. október 30. Online: https://ijnet.org/en/story/digging-deeper-5-ws-journalism

Mayr, Christina 2017: When Robots Write Articles – Capabilities and Consequences of Algorithmic Journalism. Szakdolgozat. Bécs: Universität Wien.

Mercier-Laurent, E. 2020: The Future of AI or AI for the Future. In: Strous, Leon – Johnson, Roger George – Grier, David Alan – Swade, Doron (szerk.): Unimagined Futures – ICT Opportunities and Challenges. New York: Springer International Publishing. 20–37. Online: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64246-4_3

Monti, Matteo 2018: Automated Journalism and Freedom of Information: Ethical and Juridical Problems Related to AI in the Press Field. Opinio Juris in Comparatione 1/1: 139–155.

Oremus, Will 2022 : Google’s AI passed a famous test – and showed how the test is broken. The Washington Post, 2022. június 17. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/17/google-ai-lamda-turing-test/

Zhai, Yujia – Yan, Jiaqi – Zhang, Hezhao – Lu, Wei 2020 : Tracing the Evolution of AI: onceptualization of Artificial Intelligence in Mass Media Discourse. Information Discovery and Delivery 48/3: 137–149. Online: https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-01-2020-0007