Gannett Company applies artificial intelligence to summarize content

A large media company in the US called Gannett is testing a new feature that automatically summarizes articles using artificial intelligence (AI). According to an internal memo, these brief summaries will be placed at the beginning of their articles.

The AI ​​feature, called “key points” on articles, will use automated technology to generate a summary that appears below the headline. The end of the article will include a disclaimer stating “The key points at the beginning of this article were created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and moderated by the journalist first.” when posted. No other part of the article was generated using AI.”

The memo was dated May 14 and noted that opt-in to use the feature is now optional.

The summaries appear to have appeared in several online articles from USA Today (Gannett owns USA Today newspapers). The AI-generated summary “aims to enhance the reporting process and improve the reader experience,” according to the memo. The memo also states that the AI ​​model powering the tool was trained internally over nine months.

“The memo says it all,” Gannett spokeswoman Lark-Marie Anton said in an email. Gannett once tested using AI to create content automatically, but encountered many difficulties and was not as successful as expected.

In 2023, Gannett deployed an AI system to create sports recaps. However, the odd and inaccurate writing style of these summaries has caused ridicule and negative reactions from readers. Ultimately, Gannett was forced to stop producing AI-generated sports recaps in August 2023.

In October 2023, Gannett employees at Reviewed, the company’s consumer products website, also discovered that some content on the site was automatically generated by AI without explicit attribution. clear. This makes many people concerned about the transparency and reliability of information on Reviewed.

The addition of AI-generated summaries comes as members of a local union expressed concerns about proposed contract language related to the use of AI. According to Digiday, unionized workers at the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, New York, were concerned to see a clause added to their contract during bargaining stating: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) ) can be used to create news content.”

AI-generated summaries of news articles reflect what’s happening with search platforms: at this week’s Google I/O developer conference, the tech giant revealed Revealing all the ways AI will become part of Search, including adding AI answers at the top of results pages. Even TikTok is testing AI-generated “overviews” in search results pages. The prioritization of AI answers – trained on human-generated content – ​​can override actual websites and links, which can be detrimental to publishers and traffic. access, as users stop reading after reading the AI ​​summaries instead of continuing to the original source.

Spokesperson Anton did not respond to Techlade’s questions about whether AI’s summaries might discourage readers from reading the actual article.