Rome, Italy:
In a world first, an Italian newspaper Printt Printt a completely edited edition generated by AI for a month in what the director said on Thursday was an experiment to “revitalize journalism, not to kill it”.
Il Foglio, a daily widescreen with an irreverent touch and a circulation of approximately 29,000, says it is the first newspaper in the world that prints entire editions made by artificial intelligence, a budding technology that quickly changes how news rooms work.
It started on Tuesday a daily AI edition of four pages in print and online, in addition to the normal edition, with around 22 articles and three editorial articles.
Simply put, the 20-expanded journalists from the newspaper ask for a version of OpenAi's Chatgpt Chatbot to write a story about a specific subject in a specific tone, and it produces a text with the help of information that has been scraped from the internet.
Examples of this week include an analysis of the speeches of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, an editorial chapter on the recent phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – and a fashion story.
The director of Il Foglio, Claudio Cerasa, explained the idea behind the project to AFP and how it goes.
What do you want to achieve with this?
“The goal is two -fold. On the one hand, to put theory into practice. On the other hand, it is to test ourselves and therefore understand what the limits of AI are, but also the opportunities, the boundaries that must be overcome and that cannot be.
“All this can come from a special newspaper like ours, because ours is a newspaper that has irreverent, ironic, creative writing. We do things that are not easy to reproduce with a machine.
“It was a desire to show us up with us special and to experiment with something that nobody in the world is experimented in a disturbing way, creating a debate, but especially, who first try to understand how AI can be integrated with natural intelligence.”
How does the process work in practice?
“Many topics are discussed in the editorial meeting. Some of these topics are then not only dealt with by the normal newspaper, but also by the artificial newspaper.
“Every question asked AI contains a request for a theme … A request for a tone: respectful, irreverent, outrageous, provocative. Ultimately, we ask to have the style of the paper.
“If there are too many mistakes, we change articles (start a new one). If there are few mistakes, we will leave them, because we also want to understand what the limits are.”
What lessons did you learn the first few days?
“Artificial intelligence exceeds all expectations. We have learned that it can do things that can compete with what a person does, but we have learned that competition should cause more efficiency in the long term.
“Innovation must be accepted because you cannot stop, it must be understood, ruled and become a chance for growth.
“If one day there is a question for articles that were only made with AI, it must be accepted. But that question must increase the creativity of journalists, because journalists have to get used to not doing things that a machine could.
“So it's a way to breathe new life into journalism, not to kill it.”
Are journalists in the newsroom worried?
“No, everyone is entertained, everyone is curious and among other things it is interesting that we reach a much larger audience with this experiment. There are many people who, thanks to AI, discover the traditional newspaper. The first day we had a turnover increase of 60 percent.
“It is no coincidence that no large newspaper has thought (do) because it is clearly scary. Only a newspaper like ours, which is somewhat unique, can afford to do such an experiment.”
He added: “The articles written by people are better because they always have something more, they always have an element of creativity, of connection, making unpredictable links that AI does not have.”
What do readers say?
“The readers are 90 percent entertained, 10 percent delivered because they say:” Make sure you never leave your natural intelligence because you are better. “But there is no one who says that the operation is stupid and meaningless.
“Everyone understood the Spirit.”
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by Our staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
