来源：《经济学人》
原文见刊日期：2023年5月6日
A sensational scoop was tweeted last month by America’s National Public Radio: Elon Musk’s “massive space sex rocket” had exploded on launch. Alas, it turned out to be an automated mistranscription of SpaceX, the billionaire’s rocketry firm. The error may be a taste of what is to come as artificial intelligence (AI) plays a bigger role in newsrooms.
上个月，美国国家公共广播电台在推特上发布了一则耸人听闻的独家新闻：埃隆·马斯克的“大型太空性爱火箭”在发射时爆炸。唉，结果是自动误译了这位亿万富翁的火箭公司SpaceX。随着人工智能(AI)在新闻编辑室发挥更大的作用，这个错误可能预示着未来会发生什么。
Machines have been helping deliver the news for years: the Associated Press (AP) began publishing automated company earnings reports in 2014. The New York Times uses machine learning to decide how many free articles to show readers before they hit a paywall. Bayerischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, moderates online comments with AI help. AP now also deploys it to create video “shot lists”, describing who and what is in each clip.
多年来，机器一直在帮助传递新闻：美联社（AP）于2014年开始发布自动化的公司盈利报告。《纽约时报》使用机器学习来决定在读者触及付费墙之前向他们展示多少篇免费文章。德国公共广播公司巴伐利亚广播公司在人工智能的帮助下避免网络评论极端化。美联社现在还将AI用于创建视频“拍摄列表”，描述每个视频片段中的人物和内容。
As AI improves, it is taking on more creative roles. One is newsgathering. At Reuters, machines look for patterns in large data sets. AP uses AI for “event detection”, scanning social media for ripples of news. At a journalism conference last month in Perugia, Italy, Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University showed how ChatGPT, a hit AI chatbot, could be used to assess the newsworthiness of research papers. The judgments of his model and those of human editors had a correlation coefficient of 0.58—maybe a close enough match to help a busy newsroom with an initial sift.
随着人工智能的进步，它正在承担更多创造性的角色。一个是新闻采集。在路透社，机器在大型数据集中寻找模式。美联社利用人工智能进行“事件检测”，扫描社交媒体，寻找新闻的涟漪。上个月在意大利佩鲁贾举行的一次新闻会议上，西北大学的尼克·迪亚科波洛斯展示了如何使用热门人工智能聊天机器人ChatGPT来评估研究论文的新闻价值。他的模型和人类编辑的判断的相关系数为0.58，这可能足以帮助繁忙的新闻编辑室进行初步筛选。
ChatGPT-like “generative” AIs are getting better at doing the writing and editing, too. Radar AI, a British firm, creates data-driven pieces for local papers. Its five human journalists have filed more than 400,000 partly automated stories since 2018. In November Schibsted, a Norwegian media firm, launched an AI tool to turn long articles into short packages for Snapchat, a social network. News executives see potential in automatically reshaping stories for different formats or audiences.
类似ChatGPT的“生成型”人工智能在写作和编辑方面也越来越好。英国雷达人工智能公司为当地报纸制作数据驱动的文章。自2018年以来，该公司的五名人类记者已经送交了超过40万篇部分自动化的报道。去年11月，挪威媒体公司Schibsted推出了一款人工智能工具，可以将长篇文章转化为社交网络平台Snapchat上的短包。新闻主管看到了为不同格式或受众自动重塑故事的潜力。
Some sense a profound change in what this means for the news industry. AI “is going to change journalism more in the next three years than journalism has changed in the last 30 years”, predicts David Caswell of BBC News. By remixing information from across the internet, generative models are “messing with the fundamental unit of journalism”: the article. Instead of a single first draft of history, Mr Caswell says, the news may become “a sort of ‘soup’ of language that is experienced differently by different people”.
一些人感觉到这对新闻业意味着什么，这是一个深刻的变化。BBC新闻的大卫•卡斯韦尔预测，人工智能“将在未来三年改变新闻业，其影响将超过新闻业过去30年的变化”。通过重新混合来自互联网的信息，生成模型正在“扰乱新闻业的基本单位”：文章。卡斯韦尔说，新闻可能会变成“一种语言的‘汤’，不同的人会有不同的体验”，而不再是一份单一的历史初稿。