Microsoft’s chatbot will serve as a research tool for journalists writing “Signals,” which will be written entirely by them.
According to a report by The Financial Times, Microsoft is collaborating with the media website Semafor on a new project that provides assistance in the production of news stories through the utilization of ChatGPT. Following the filing of a lawsuit by the New York Times against the software giant and its partner, OpenAI, for copyright infringement, Microsoft is planning to unveil a number of journalistic collaborations today. This initiative is one of several that will be announced today.
According to the article, Semafor, which was co-founded by Ben Smith, who formerly served as the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, will produce a feed that will be dubbed “Signals.” Microsoft will sponsor the feed for an amount that has not been disclosed but is described as “substantial.” It will provide information on breaking news and analysis, with approximately a dozen items being published each day. It is expected that all of the stories will be authored by journalists, with the artificial intelligence serving mostly as a research tool.
As a response to the profound and ongoing upheavals that have occurred in the digital media landscape and the post-social news moment, as well as the threats and opportunities that are provided by artificial intelligence, Signals has been developed. When Semafor wrote.
To be more specific, the team at Semafor will make use of artificial intelligence techniques in order to quickly locate breaking event reporting from various news sources all around the world in multiple languages, while also providing translation capabilities. It is also possible for an article to incorporate Chinese, Indian, or other sources, with reporters providing additional context and summarizing the many points of view. “Journalists need to adopt these tools in order to survive and thrive for another generation,” said Noreen Gillespie, a former journalist for the Associated Press who is now employed by Microsoft, in an interview with The Financial Times.
The utilization of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots in newsrooms has been met with a great deal of controversy. Recently, websites such as CNET have begun using these chatbots to generate complete feature-length pieces, albeit with the assistance of human editors. In spite of the fact that artificial intelligence is capable of “hallucinating” (creating information that is not genuine) and displaying other types of strange behavior. For the sake of enhancing reporting and possibly competing with chatbots that produce reams of content that is optimized for search engine optimization, newsrooms are attempting to figure out how to employ them.
The New York Times made the announcement around the end of the previous year that it was going to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for exploiting published news items to train its chatbots without offering any compensation. This is the first time that a major news business has taken legal action against the makers of ChatGPT for allegedly infringing upon their copyright license. The lawsuit has the potential to demand billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.
Additionally, Microsoft made an announcement today on collaborations with other journalistic organizations, including the GroundTruth Project, the Online News Association, and the Craig Newmark School of journalistic.