Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney, hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corp., and spoke about the values and importance of journalism, and how the news service is using artificial intelligence.
Here is an excerpt:
AI can be a powerful tool — a force multiplier — in this crucial endeavour. But we have to use it responsibly.
AI is helping our reporters work faster, identify patterns, connect the dots in the reporting. In the revenge series, for example, the reporters used AI to build databases of thousands of media posts to document how the president and his allies targeted their retribution campaign against people.
AI was also used to mine transcripts of Trump’s speeches and orders — and the writings and comments of his top appointees — for evidence of the political motivations behind the administration’s threats and punitive acts.
In a separate investigation last year on the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, a team of our journalists in Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, London and Toronto employed AI tools to turn 20,000 pages of photographed documents into searchable texts — a trove of information that helped us reveal the existence of a mass grave — and the men behind it — that was at the heart of a campaign to conceal atrocities under Assad.
In this kind of multi-faceted reporting work, AI is now one of many tools in a journalist’s toolbox.
Our newsroom uses AI in other ways too, helping us to distil information from press releases, speeches and other official documents and then provide it to financial clients and other audiences.
For example, we can produce headlines from a press release in seconds with a tool called Factgenie; we can draft the first, urgent paragraph of a breaking news story in under a minute, and we can have a multimedia package and a half-dozen translations just moments later.
We also use an AI tool to generate bullet point summaries at the top of stories — this is useful for many audiences, from the casual reader to the fast-moving trader.
