Artificial intelligence—to many, it’s a scary concept. To others, especially early adopters of systems like ChatGPT, it’s become a valuable tool in their lives.  

There is a lot of talk about AI's place in journalism and whether it should be part of any process, and I find a lot of unnecessary fear.  

I am often asked about it: how we are using it, whether we use it to create stories, what it does, why we put a disclaimer in our paper and our website, and what more we can do to promote transparency of its use.  

My newsroom has been at the forefront of Newsquest's use of AI. We have an AI-assisted reporter called Bobby Angelov. Bobby is a real person.

However, the AI role appealed to him because it would allow him to be at the forefront of technology while also being able to work from home and work regular hours.  

His job role is AI-assisted reporter - however, he's probably more appropriately named an AI editor.  

He uses company-created AI, which is secure and filled with all our prompts and styles, to help him process a large volume of stories. He checks and verifies to ensure that what AI produces is correct and in the style that our readers expect.  

To be clear, AI is not generating these stories, we are giving it something to work on. It's more helping in the editing and production. 

These are usually the smaller stories you’d expect to see in a local newspaper. Press releases from businesses, cheque presentations from charities, news from local schools – that sort of thing.

Largely sent in and very well written in the first place, however, the copy is usually in need of putting into our style and often summarizing into a set word count, and it also needs processing – so it needs headlines (of which we write three different ones for each story), a social sell for social media, metadata ticked so it appears on the right bit of the website, pictures and captions adding, and a whole bunch of other administrative things that come with each and every one of our stories these days.