Bloomberg has a rocky start with AI summaries

Bloomberg, the financial news powerhouse, has been experimenting with using artificial intelligence to help produce its journalism, but it hasn’t always gone smoothly, reports Katie Robertson of The New York Times.

Robertson reports, “The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year. One happened on Wednesday, when Bloomberg broke news about President Trump’s auto tariffs.

“The article correctly reported that Mr. Trump would announce the tariffs as soon as that day. But the bullet-point summary of the article written by A.I. inaccurately said when a broader tariff action would take place.

“Bloomberg is not alone in trying A.I. — many news outlets are figuring out how best to embrace the new technology and use it in their reporting and editing. The newspaper chain Gannett uses similar A.I.-generated summaries on its articles, and The Washington Post has a tool called ‘Ask the Post’ that generates answers to questions from published Post articles.”

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.