Several Boston-area news publications are using artificial intelligence to generate articles for their websites, according to a human-written story by editor Dan O’Brien of MetroWest Daily News.
In the story, O’Brien mentions MetroWest Daily News, Milford Daily News and Wicked Local — all owned by the media company Gannett, which publishes USA TODAY and hundreds of newspapers — are using an artificial intelligence tool called Espresso that is “designed to draft polished articles from community announcements.” O’Brien said reporter Beth McDermott has already been using the generative AI tool, with multiple appearances of her byline on the local outlets’ websites.
Interview requests to the local papers were referred to Gannett Corporate Communications & Public Relations spokespeople. In a statement, the company confirmed to GBH News that McDermott is a real person.
“By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “With human oversight at every step, AI-assisted reporting meets our high standards for quality and accuracy to provide our readers more valuable content which they’ve always associated with the USA TODAY Network.”
McDermott’s AI-assisted stories come with a note at the bottom stating that “Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process” and linking to Gannett’s ethical conduct standards, which refer to artificial intelligence as “a helpful tool” and leave use of AI tools largely up to the editor and reporter.
But Burt Herman, cofounder and principal of the media innovation nonprofit Hack Hackers, doesn’t think most readers will actually review that ethics policy.
“People will mistrust this because it says AI reporter,” he said, adding that even if a reader looks through the whole policy, it won’t answer all of their questions. For example, because the policy is written broadly to apply to all Gannett-owned media, it doesn’t get into story-specific details. Readers won’t know how much of a story McDermott used AI for, and how much was from her own reporting.
Ryan Kellett, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, said the most common uses of artificial intelligence in journalism today are to take the “grunt work” off reporters and streamline their work.
“The most the most common use of AI in journalism today is really behind the scenes. It’s things that are not visible to viewers,” Kellett said.
That includes data-processing tools that format text, transcribe audio into writing, or help a reporter search through their website library to find images based on keywords. Adoption of generative AI, which don’t just process content but create it based on user-input prompts, has been met with more skepticism in the industry due to ethical concerns, but common uses of those tools include drafting of headlines or creating article summaries.
Gannett has made headlines before because of its adoption of AI tools.
In 2023, the publisher got flak for AI-generated sports recaps. Last year, the company rolled out AI-generated summaries placed beneath headlines, providing the “key points” to readers in a rush. And the company recently announced plans to hire multiple AI positions in its sports department, which was met with criticism amid contract negotiations and, for many, resurfaced frustrations over Gannett’s 2023 attempt at AI-generated sports recaps.
“There’s a lot of slop out there,” said Mike Carraggi, a product manager at Patch, which he said the company wanted to avoid when adopting generative AI itself. He said using AI to create their morning newsletters from material published on human-vetted websites and community submissions helps Patch serve more audiences than they’d otherwise be able to.
“We’ve been able to expand from 1,200 [Patch communities] to over 7,000 in a matter of months without increasing our headcount,” said Carraggi. Carraggi said Patch has 116 staffed sites across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Others are served only by AI-generated content.
One newsletter forwarded to GBH shows the weather, local aggregated news with summaries, upcoming events, and “chatter” including what neighbors are talking about on social media, and job openings.
“In these new communities where we don’t have a full-time reporter, we’re a platform now — we’re not a publisher there — there’s a difference,” he said.
One local entrepreneur, Winston Chen, is trying to get more newsrooms on board with generative AI through a tool he helped create. He and David Trilling co-founded Inside Arlington in 2023 after hearing other residents complain about not being able to attend the town’s hours-long meetings.
“We just said, ‘Why don’t we take this new-fangled AI technology … use that to download audio from local government meetings, and then use AI to transcribe the meetings, and then use another AI to summarize the what happened in the meetings?’”
He said Trilling would make sure there were no errors in the summaries that were produced. They spoke with leaders of new nonprofit outlets in Lexington, Belmont and the Cape area, but the idea hasn’t yet caught on.
“We built the technology so that it’s not specific to Arlington,” he said. “We want to we want to be able to to provide this as a free service to any town or any local media who want it.”