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Business Insider Reportedly Tells Journalists They Can Use AI To Draft Stories (theverge.com) 17

Posted by msmash from the AI-slop dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Business Insider has told journalists they can use AI to create first drafts of stories and suggested it won't notify readers that AI was used, according to Status, a newsletter covering the media industry. The policy makes the outlet one of the first to formally allow such extensive use of the technology.

The AI guidelines were reportedly circulated in an internal memo from editor-in-chief Jamie Heller on Thursday. The policy authorized journalists to deploy AI "like any other tool" for tasks like research and image editing, Status reported.
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Business Insider Reportedly Tells Journalists They Can Use AI To Draft Stories More

Business Insider Reportedly Tells Journalists They Can Use AI To Draft Stories

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  • "won't notify readers that AI was used" the editors won't need to mention it.

    • Re:Funny! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PDXNerd ( 654900 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @10:41AM (#65665976)

      one of the first to formally allow such extensive use of the technology.

      They (the industry) have been using it and haven't mentioned it, at least Business Insider is admitting it. Anyway putting "AI draft" on an article would result in less readers so its in their financial best interest to use this as much as possible and not admit it.

  • AI is no problem but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @10:45AM (#65665986)
    AI is for me no problem but some human needs to sign off on it.
    There are plenty of cases where AI comes up with invented stories (hallucinations) and we need to be able to address a human when corrections are required.
    • The real problem AI is quotations where the source is not attached. Recording and keeping video, audio and interviews is zero compared to the coffee habit of the reporter. Since it is now no effort under our AI overlords the original video index, kept and properly transcribed is not a cost issue. After the past week I want the 3 hours of raw video, uploaded and checksum the same hour it was finalized, and I want links to other archives of similar recordings time and date wise with absolutely corre
  • I expect editors also won't notify journalists when that "freelance" article was done entirely by AI + editing.
    • I love to ask AI to compare and contrast all WaPo story from 2016 and WaPo story from 2025 with the same keywords and context and let the amazement flow. Or train an AI on 2004 and 2024 and let it spit out the diffrence in meaning and word usage of "far-right", "far-left" and "progressive". That news is considered a source of truth by anyone is insane outside of todays weather at zip code scales is amazing. It being changed more rapidly than song styles since the first time The Who said they were

  • Content Mill (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @11:02AM (#65666030)

    Business Insider is already a content mill. I suspect that "allowing" AI will become a de facto requiring its use because there will be productivity requirements that would be impossible without it.

  • I don't have a problem with using the AI to create first drafts, but I worry that some of the journalists, especially under tight deadlines, might take shortcuts and decide to just publish the AI draft.

    Having the AI create a draft that the human journalist reviews and revises? Fine.

    Having the AI just write the story and publishing it without review? Not so good.

  • There are already plenty of news stories that appear to be just someone rephrasing the AP or some other story. i.e. "The AP has reported..." with no additional info just "summarizing" the AP story. (Rephrasing its first paragraph.) Yeah, an LLM can do that pretty much by design of the architecture. A copyright washing machine. I don't know that this was ever genuinely worthwhile human work in the first place. Now whether or not that "should" be a legal non-derivative work is a separate question.
    • Every single letter of these ArtIcles should now have a link to the original source, sometimes I think 2/3s is reddit or Wikipedia or the first pass off the AP, that in my world is not a reliable source for anything but where all other data is lacking. I would simply want most of my news to be delivered to me by a agent that is very detailed in where it got information from, is that information unredacted, and is their video or audio streamed that instant that matches that quote. That any creation ca

  • This is coming from the company whose CEO "created an AI employee and then sexually harassed her" [slashdot.org]

    I heard an interview with the person and he's just a schmuck bottom feeder looking for clicks and cost reductions.

  • And nothing of value was lost. (Score:3)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @01:43PM (#65666496) Journal

    Remember: we are talking about Business Insider here.

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