AI Vs. Human: Some German Publishers Plan to Replace Journalists With AI

German newspapers Bild and Die Welt have announced that they will lay off some employees because of the emergence of artificial intelligence, as reported by The Guardian.

Goals to boost revenue at German newspapers mean job cuts because automation and AI are making a lot of jobs in the journalism department redundant.

AI to Replace Journalists?

The potential of AI to make independent journalism better is being seen. Popular AI tools like ChatGPT can revolutionize information and could soon be better at aggregating information compared to human journalists.

This is not the first publisher to use AI in content creation. In January, BuzzFeed announced its plan to use AI to enhance its content and online quizzes. YK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express publishers are also exploring AI with a specific working group that is focused on checking for the potential limitations of Ai tools.

Since ChatGPT was launched in 2022, it has drawn over a hundred million users. The tool can generate highly sophisticated texts from simple users prompts-producing anything from essays and job applications.

However, the accuracy of its responses has been questioned, and an Australian academic found examples of the system fabricating references from websites and referencing fake quotes.

AI in Journalism

The use of AI in journalism has been controversial as well. CNET has been using an AI tool to generate articles that human editors later scan for accuracy before publication. In January, the publication acknowledged that the program had some limitations, following a report from Futurism that revealed more than half of the stories generated through AI tools had to be edited for errors.

CNET was also forced to issue major corrections to an explainer article on compound interest that contained a number of simple errors. It then issued a formidable correction and a warning on all the bot's prior work, which alerted readers that the posts' content was under factual review.

After a few days, Red Ventures, its parent company, announced that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and other properties, such as Bankrate, at least until the negative press dies down.

A new investigation by Futurism found extensive evidence that the AI used at CNET has shown deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere without giving credit. In short, the plagiarized bot work of Red Ventures competitors and human writers at Bankrate and CNET.

The bots' errors range from verbatim copying to moderate edits to significant rephrasing without properly crediting the original.