Business Insider and its ChatGPT writing guidelines

Oliver Darcy of Status writes about Business Insider and its new ChatGPT writing guidelines.

Darcy writes, “On Thursday afternoon, Business Insider staffers received a long-awaited memo from editor in chief Jamie Heller, outlining the Axel Springer-owned outlet’s rules for using artificial intelligence. The guidelines had been eagerly anticipated since earlier this summer, when Mathias Döpfner, chief of the German publishing giant Axel Springer, urged employees at a corporate town hall to weave A.I. into their daily work, but left the specifics to individual publications.

“Heller’s note filled the information vacuum, spelling out both restrictions and expectations for staff. ‘This policy is designed to enable and encourage us to experiment with A.I., a rapidly changing technology, as we continue to pursue the biggest stories about business, tech, innovation, and more for our audience,’ she wrote in the memo, obtained by Status.

“The guidelines unsurprisingly said that BI journalists can use A.I.—’just like any other tool’—for tasks such as research. And they said staffers ‘may use approved A.I. tools for specific tasks and enhancements for images and video.’ But it was, of course, the rules about using ChatGPT in writing that caught the attention of most staffers.”

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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.