How CoinDesk plans to use AI

Pete Pachal, chief of staff for content at CoinDesk, writes about how the site will use artificial intelligence in writing stories:

Pachal writes, “With that in mind, CoinDesk will allow generative text to be used in some articles, subject to the following rules. The generative text must be:

Run through plagiarism-detection software
Checked that its sources are reliable (The tool must be capable of citing sources.)
Carefully fact-checked by the writer and editor, including quotations
Edited with an eye toward adding the “human” element
Disclosed. The fact that AI contributed to the article must be clear to the reader.

“Given the requirements and the inherent limitations of AI with respect to the primary ingredients of journalism (e.g., talking to sources), the number of use cases for generative text are few. However, we see an opportunity for AI to assist in explanatory content, such as in this article here. In every case where generative text is used in the body of an article – whether in whole or in part – the AI’s contribution will be clear through both a disclosure at the bottom of the article and the AI’s byline: CoinDesk Bot.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.