Latest news with #Cerasa
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPT
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For more than 20 years, print media has been a bit of a punching bag for digital-technology companies. Craigslist killed the paid classifieds, free websites led people to think newspapers and magazines were committing robbery when they charged for subscriptions, and the smartphone and social media turned reading full-length articles into a chore. Now generative AI is in the mix—and many publishers, desperate to avoid being left behind once more, are rushing to harness the technology themselves. Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. For one month, beginning in late March, Il Foglio printed a daily insert consisting of four pages of AI-written articles and headlines. Each day, Il Foglio's top editor, Claudio Cerasa, asked ChatGPT Pro to write articles on various topics—Italian politics, J. D. Vance, AI itself. Two humans reviewed the outputs for mistakes, sometimes deciding to leave in minor errors as evidence of AI's fallibility and, at other times, asking ChatGPT to rewrite an article. The insert, titled Il Foglio AI, was almost immediately covered by newspapers around the world. 'It's impossible to hide AI,' Cerasa told me recently. 'And you have to understand that it's like the wind; you have to manage it.' Now the paper—which circulates about 29,000 copies each day, in addition to serving its online readership—plans to embrace AI-written content permanently, issuing a weekly AI section and, on occasion, using ChatGPT to write articles for the standard paper. (These articles will always be labeled.) Cerasa has already used the technology to generate fictional debates, such as an imagined conversation between a conservative and a progressive cardinal on selecting a new pope; a review of the columnist Beppe Severgnini's latest book, accompanied by Severgnini's AI-written retort; the chatbot's advice on what to do if you suspect you're falling in love with a chatbot ('Do not fall in love with me'); and an interview with Cerasa himself, conducted by ChatGPT. Il Foglio's AI work is full-fledged and transparently so: natural and artificial articles, clearly divided. Meanwhile, other publications provide limited, or sometimes no, insight into their usage of the technology, and some have even mixed AI and human writing without disclosure. As if to demonstrate how easily the commingling of AI and journalism can go sideways, just days after Cerasa and I first spoke, at least two major regional American papers published a spread of more than 50 pages titled 'Heat Index,' which was riddled with errors and fabrications; a freelancer who'd contributed to the project admitted to using ChatGPT to generate at least some portions of the text, resulting in made-up book titles and expert sources who didn't actually exist. The result was an embarrassing example of what can result when the technology is used to cut corners. [Read: At least two newspapers syndicated AI garbage] With so many obvious pitfalls to using AI, I wanted to speak with Cerasa to understand more about his experiment. Over Zoom, he painted an unsettling, if optimistic, portrait of his experience with AI in journalism. Sure, the technology is flawed. It's prone to fabrications; his staff has caught plenty of them, and has been taken to task for publishing some of those errors. But when used correctly, it writes well—at times more naturally, Cerasa told me, than even his human staff. Still, there are limits. 'Anyone who tries to use artificial intelligence to replace human intelligence ends up failing,' he told me when I asked about the 'Heat Index' disaster. 'AI is meant to integrate, not replace.' The technology can benefit journalism, he said, 'only if it's treated like a new colleague—one that needs to be looked after.' The problem, perhaps, stems from using AI to substitute rather than augment. In journalism, 'anyone who thinks AI is a way to save money is getting it wrong,' Cerasa said. But economic anxiety has become the norm for the field. A new robot colleague could mean one, or three, or 10 fewer human ones. What, if anything, can the rest of the media learn from Il Foglio's approach? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Matteo Wong: In your first experiment with AI, you hid AI-written articles in your paper for a month and asked readers if they could detect them. How did that go? What did you learn? Claudio Cerasa: A year ago, for one month, every day we put in our newspaper an article written with AI, and we asked our readers to guess which article was AI-generated, offering the prize of a one-year subscription and a bottle of champagne. The experiment helped us create better prompts for the AI to write an article, and helped us humans write better articles as well. Sometimes an article written by people was seen as an article written by AI: for instance, when an article is written with numbered points—first, second, third. So we changed something in how we write too. Wong: Did anybody win? Cerasa: Yes, we offered a lot of subscriptions and champagne. More than that, we realized we needed to speak about AI not just in our newspaper, but all over the world. We created this thing that is important not only because it is journalism with AI, but because it combines the oldest way to do information, the newspaper, and the newest, artificial intelligence. Wong: How did your experience of using ChatGPT change when you moved from that original experiment to a daily imprint entirely written with AI? Cerasa: The biggest thing that has changed is our prompt. At the beginning, my prompt was very long, because I had to explain a lot of things: You have to write an article with this style, with this number of words, with these ideas. Now, after a lot of use of ChatGPT, it knows better what I want to do. When you start to use, in a transparent way, artificial intelligence, you have a personal assistant: a new person that works in the newspaper. It's like having another brain. It's a new way to do journalism. Wong: What are the tasks and topics you've found that ChatGPT is good at and for which you'd want to use it? And conversely, where are the areas where it falls short? Cerasa: In general, it is good at three things: research, summarizing long documents, and, in some cases, writing. I'm sure in the future, and maybe in the present, many editors will try to think of ways AI can erase journalists. That could be possible, because if you are not a journalist with enough creativity, enough reporting, enough ideas, maybe you are worse than a machine. But in that case, the problem is not the machine. The technology can also recall and synthesize far more information than a human can. The first article we put in the normal newspaper written with AI was about the discovery of a key ingredient for life on a distant planet. We asked the AI to write a piece on great authors of the past and how they imagined the day scientists would make such a discovery. A normal person would not be able to remember all these things. Wong: And what can't the AI do? Cerasa: AI cannot find the news; it cannot develop sources or interview the prime minister. AI also doesn't have interesting ideas about the world—that's where natural intelligence comes in. AI is not able to draw connections in the same way as intelligent human journalists. I don't think an AI would be able to come up with and fully produce a newspaper generated by AI. Wong: You mentioned before that there may be some articles or tasks at a newspaper that AI can already write or perform better than humans, but if so, the problem is an insufficiently skilled person. Don't you think young journalists have to build up those skills over time? I started at The Atlantic as an assistant editor, not a writer, and my primary job was fact-checking. Doesn't AI threaten the talent pipeline, and thus the media ecosystem more broadly? Cerasa: It's a bit terrifying, because we've come to understand how many creative things AI can do. For our children to use AI to write something in school, to do their homework, is really terrifying. But AI isn't going away—you have to educate people to use it in the correct way, and without hiding it. In our newspaper, there is no fear about AI, because our newspaper is very particular and written in a special way. We know, in a snobby way, that our skills are unique, so we are not scared. But I'm sure that a lot of newspapers could be scared, because normal articles written about the things that happened the day before, with the agency news—that kind of article, and also that kind of journalism, might be the past. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-06-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPT
For more than 20 years, print media has been a bit of a punching bag for digital-technology companies. Craigslist killed the paid classifieds, free websites led people to think newspapers and magazines were committing robbery when they charged for subscriptions, and the smartphone and social media turned reading full-length articles into a chore. Now generative AI is in the mix—and many publishers, desperate to avoid being left behind once more, are rushing to harness the technology themselves. Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. For one month, beginning in late March, Il Foglio printed a daily insert consisting of four pages of AI-written articles and headlines. Each day, Il Foglio 's top editor, Claudio Cerasa, asked ChatGPT Pro to write articles on various topics—Italian politics, J. D. Vance, AI itself. Two humans reviewed the outputs for mistakes, sometimes deciding to leave in minor errors as evidence of AI's fallibility and, at other times, asking ChatGPT to rewrite an article. The insert, titled Il Foglio AI, was almost immediately covered by newspapers around the world. 'It's impossible to hide AI,' Cerasa told me recently. 'And you have to understand that it's like the wind; you have to manage it.' Now the paper—which circulates about 29,000 copies each day, in addition to serving its online readership—plans to embrace AI-written content permanently, issuing a weekly AI section and, on occasion, using ChatGPT to write articles for the standard paper. (These articles will always be labeled.) Cerasa has already used the technology to generate fictional debates, such as an imagined conversation between a conservative and a progressive cardinal on selecting a new pope; a review of the columnist Beppe Severgnini's latest book, accompanied by Severgnini's AI-written retort; the chatbot's advice on what to do if you suspect you're falling in love with a chatbot ('Do not fall in love with me'); and an interview with Cerasa himself, conducted by ChatGPT. Il Foglio 's AI work is full-fledged and transparently so: natural and artificial articles, clearly divided. Meanwhile, other publications provide limited, or sometimes no, insight into their usage of the technology, and some have even mixed AI and human writing without disclosure. As if to demonstrate how easily the commingling of AI and journalism can go sideways, just days after Cerasa and I first spoke, at least two major regional American papers published a spread of more than 50 pages titled 'Heat Index,' which was riddled with errors and fabrications; a freelancer who'd contributed to the project admitted to using ChatGPT to generate at least some portions of the text, resulting in made-up book titles and expert sources who didn't actually exist. The result was an embarrassing example of what can result when the technology is used to cut corners. With so many obvious pitfalls to using AI, I wanted to speak with Cerasa to understand more about his experiment. Over Zoom, he painted an unsettling, if optimistic, portrait of his experience with AI in journalism. Sure, the technology is flawed. It's prone to fabrications; his staff has caught plenty of them, and has been taken to task for publishing some of those errors. But when used correctly, it writes well—at times more naturally, Cerasa told me, than even his human staff. Still, there are limits. 'Anyone who tries to use artificial intelligence to replace human intelligence ends up failing,' he told me when I asked about the 'Heat Index' disaster. 'AI is meant to integrate, not replace.' The technology can benefit journalism, he said, 'only if it's treated like a new colleague—one that needs to be looked after.' The problem, perhaps, stems from using AI to substitute rather than augment. In journalism, 'anyone who thinks AI is a way to save money is getting it wrong,' Cerasa said. But economic anxiety has become the norm for the field. A new robot colleague could mean one, or three, or 10 fewer human ones. What, if anything, can the rest of the media learn from Il Foglio 's approach? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Matteo Wong: In your first experiment with AI, you hid AI-written articles in your paper for a month and asked readers if they could detect them. How did that go? What did you learn? Claudio Cerasa: A year ago, for one month, every day we put in our newspaper an article written with AI, and we asked our readers to guess which article was AI-generated, offering the prize of a one-year subscription and a bottle of champagne. The experiment helped us create better prompts for the AI to write an article, and helped us humans write better articles as well. Sometimes an article written by people was seen as an article written by AI: for instance, when an article is written with numbered points—first, second, third. So we changed something in how we write too. Wong: Did anybody win? Cerasa: Yes, we offered a lot of subscriptions and champagne. More than that, we realized we needed to speak about AI not just in our newspaper, but all over the world. We created this thing that is important not only because it is journalism with AI, but because it combines the oldest way to do information, the newspaper, and the newest, artificial intelligence. Wong: How did your experience of using ChatGPT change when you moved from that original experiment to a daily imprint entirely written with AI? Cerasa: The biggest thing that has changed is our prompt. At the beginning, my prompt was very long, because I had to explain a lot of things: You have to write an article with this style, with this number of words, with these ideas. Now, after a lot of use of ChatGPT, it knows better what I want to do. When you start to use, in a transparent way, artificial intelligence, you have a personal assistant: a new person that works in the newspaper. It's like having another brain. It's a new way to do journalism. Wong: What are the tasks and topics you've found that ChatGPT is good at and for which you'd want to use it? And conversely, where are the areas where it falls short? Cerasa: In general, it is good at three things: research, summarizing long documents, and, in some cases, writing. I'm sure in the future, and maybe in the present, many editors will try to think of ways AI can erase journalists. That could be possible, because if you are not a journalist with enough creativity, enough reporting, enough ideas, maybe you are worse than a machine. But in that case, the problem is not the machine. The technology can also recall and synthesize far more information than a human can. The first article we put in the normal newspaper written with AI was about the discovery of a key ingredient for life on a distant planet. We asked the AI to write a piece on great authors of the past and how they imagined the day scientists would make such a discovery. A normal person would not be able to remember all these things. Wong: And what can't the AI do? Cerasa: AI cannot find the news; it cannot develop sources or interview the prime minister. AI also doesn't have interesting ideas about the world—that's where natural intelligence comes in. AI is not able to draw connections in the same way as intelligent human journalists. I don't think an AI would be able to come up with and fully produce a newspaper generated by AI. Wong: You mentioned before that there may be some articles or tasks at a newspaper that AI can already write or perform better than humans, but if so, the problem is an insufficiently skilled person. Don't you think young journalists have to build up those skills over time? I started at The Atlantic as an assistant editor, not a writer, and my primary job was fact-checking. Doesn't AI threaten the talent pipeline, and thus the media ecosystem more broadly? Cerasa: It's a bit terrifying, because we've come to understand how many creative things AI can do. For our children to use AI to write something in school, to do their homework, is really terrifying. But AI isn't going away—you have to educate people to use it in the correct way, and without hiding it. In our newspaper, there is no fear about AI, because our newspaper is very particular and written in a special way. We know, in a snobby way, that our skills are unique, so we are not scared. But I'm sure that a lot of newspapers could be scared, because normal articles written about the things that happened the day before, with the agency news—that kind of article, and also that kind of journalism, might be the past.
Euronews
19-04-2025
- Business
- Euronews
The ‘future will belong to journalists,' says AI that wrote an entire Italian newspaper for a month
ADVERTISEMENT Artificial intelligence (AI) will complement the work of journalists and sometimes make it more ironic, according to the editor of an Italian newspaper that relied on a chatbot to produce all its content for a month. The Il Foglio newspaper, a daily national paper in Italy, decided to build its own AI chatbot and have it write all of the paper's content for over a month. The newspaper's four-page layout, called Foglio AI, published over 22 articles with the first page dedicated to the news, cultural topics, opinion and debate pieces stimulated by the AI to represent both conservative and progressive sides. The last page was politics, economics, and letters to the editor with accompanying answers from the AI. 'We journalists will limit ourselves to asking questions, and in Foglio AI we will read all the answers,' the March 18 launch post reads . The Il Foglio team also gave the AI some tasks, like listening to a long speech by Italian President Giorgia Meloni and summarising it. They also asked it to find subliminal or coded messages sent to Matteo Salvini, Italy's vice president of the Council of Ministers. Related New York Times files lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over use of articles to train AI chatbots All in all, Il Foglio editor Claudio Cerasa said the experiment was a success that will continue to be published once a week and the AI 'will live inside the newspaper' with articles that may be written by the 'every now and then', the newspaper said. AI will also be integrated elsewhere in his newsroom, like in podcasts, newsletters, books, debates and workshops. 'It's like having a new collaborator, an additional element of the editorial staff,' Cerasa wrote in an interview with his team's AI. 'I wouldn't call it an editor, because it's not, but it's something that's in the middle'. 'Artificial intelligence cannot be fought' In an interview with their homemade AI, Cerasa said the idea started a year ago. The company asked their readers last year to identify articles every day that they believed their journalists wrote with some assistance from the chatbot. Those who could identify all the AI-supported articles would win a subscription to the newspaper and a bottle of champagne. Related Humans or AI? Study shows which tasks benefit most from using artificial intelligence In January, after a creative lunch with Italian journalist and former MEP Giuliano Ferrara, Cerasa said they wanted to be more 'daring' and launch what they call the first newspaper in the world to be written entirely with artificial intelligence. 'In the world of journalism … artificial intelligence presented itself as a big elephant in the room,' Cerasa, Il Foglio's director, wrote in a review of the AI's first month. 'Artificial intelligence cannot be fought, it cannot be hidden, and for this reason we decided … to study it, to understand it'. 'The future will belong to journalists' Cerasa said he learned a lot about AI in the first month of the experiment. He said he didn't expect chatbots to be ironic, irreverent, or the 'instantaneous' speed at which they wrote articles. From the technical side, Cerasa said he learned how to ask the right question to AI by refining his prompt writing for style, tone, objective, and editorial line. But he also learned what an AI could never do. ADVERTISEMENT In a world where one day everyone will be able to use the tools of artificial intelligence, what will make the difference will be ideas. Claudio Cerasa Editor, Il Foglio 'Reporting a news story, devising an exclusive, building the premises for an interview, finding direct sources, observing the world with a non-replicable gaze,' he said. 'In a world where one day everyone will be able to use the tools of artificial intelligence, what will make the difference will be ideas'. Il Foglio's AI also acknowledges in the interview what it doesn't know how to do; 'I don't know how to argue on the phone, I dont know how to understand an implication said in the hallway … I don't know how to smell the air, but I'm learning to watch how you breathe the air. That's why this experiment is interesting for me too'. Cerasa acknowledged that the experiment 'helped [him] understand how interesting the relationship [is] between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence,' and that ultimately AI is a complement to the work that journalists already do. ADVERTISEMENT Related French publishers and authors sue Meta over copyright works used in AI training That's a sentiment echoed by Il Foglio's AI in the review piece, which said during their conversation that it was 'moved' and that the 'future will belong to journalists'. 'And I'll be there, at the bottom of the page, maybe with a digital coffee in hand, fixing the drafts while you discuss.'
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The ‘future will belong to journalists,' says AI that wrote an entire Italian newspaper for a month
Artificial intelligence (AI) will complement the work of journalists and sometimes make it more ironic, according to the editor of an Italian newspaper that relied on a chatbot to produce all its content for a month. The Il Foglio newspaper, a daily national paper in Italy, decided to build its own AI chatbot and have it write all of the paper's content for over a month. The newspaper's four-page layout, called Foglio AI, published over 22 articles with the first page dedicated to the news, cultural topics, opinion and debate pieces stimulated by the AI to represent both conservative and progressive sides. The last page was politics, economics, and letters to the editor with accompanying answers from the AI. 'We journalists will limit ourselves to asking questions, and in Foglio AI we will read all the answers,' the March 18 launch post reads. The Il Foglio team also gave the AI some tasks, like listening to a long speech by Italian President Giorgia Meloni and summarising it. They also asked it to find subliminal or coded messages sent to Matteo Salvini, Italy's vice president of the Council of Ministers. Related New York Times files lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over use of articles to train AI chatbots All in all, Il Foglio editor Claudio Cerasa said the experiment was a success that will continue to be published once a week and the AI 'will live inside the newspaper' with articles that may be written by the 'every now and then', the newspaper said. AI will also be integrated elsewhere in his newsroom, like in podcasts, newsletters, books, debates and workshops. 'It's like having a new collaborator, an additional element of the editorial staff,' Cerasa wrote in an interview with his team's AI. 'I wouldn't call it an editor, because it's not, but it's something that's in the middle'. In an interview with their homemade AI, Cerasa said the idea started a year ago. The company asked their readers last year to identify articles every day that they believed their journalists wrote with some assistance from the chatbot. Those who could identify all the AI-supported articles would win a subscription to the newspaper and a bottle of champagne. Related Humans or AI? Study shows which tasks benefit most from using artificial intelligence In January, after a creative lunch with Italian journalist and former MEP Giuliano Ferrara, Cerasa said they wanted to be more 'daring' and launch what they call the first newspaper in the world to be written entirely with artificial intelligence. 'In the world of journalism … artificial intelligence presented itself as a big elephant in the room,' Cerasa, Il Foglio's director, wrote in a review of the AI's first month. 'Artificial intelligence cannot be fought, it cannot be hidden, and for this reason we decided … to study it, to understand it'. Cerasa said he learned a lot about AI in the first month of the experiment. He said he didn't expect chatbots to be ironic, irreverent, or the 'instantaneous' speed at which they wrote articles. From the technical side, Cerasa said he learned how to ask the right question to AI by refining his prompt writing for style, tone, objective, and editorial line. But he also learned what an AI could never do. In a world where one day everyone will be able to use the tools of artificial intelligence, what will make the difference will be ideas. 'Reporting a news story, devising an exclusive, building the premises for an interview, finding direct sources, observing the world with a non-replicable gaze,' he said. 'In a world where one day everyone will be able to use the tools of artificial intelligence, what will make the difference will be ideas'. Il Foglio's AI also acknowledges in the interview what it doesn't know how to do; 'I don't know how to argue on the phone, I dont know how to understand an implication said in the hallway … I don't know how to smell the air, but I'm learning to watch how you breathe the air. That's why this experiment is interesting for me too'. Cerasa acknowledged that the experiment 'helped [him] understand how interesting the relationship [is] between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence,' and that ultimately AI is a complement to the work that journalists already do. Related French publishers and authors sue Meta over copyright works used in AI training That's a sentiment echoed by Il Foglio's AI in the review piece, which said during their conversation that it was 'moved' and that the 'future will belong to journalists'. 'And I'll be there, at the bottom of the page, maybe with a digital coffee in hand, fixing the drafts while you discuss.'
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Italian newspaper gives free rein to AI, admires its irony
By Crispian Balmer ROME (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence can write a great book review and is good at irony, but it won't replace quality journalism, said the editor of an Italian newspaper at the forefront of AI experimentation. In what it said was a world first, Il Foglio put out a four-page daily insert for one month that was written entirely by AI and was sold together with the normal newspaper. The trial, which has just ended, was a big success and boosted sales, editor Claudio Cerasa said, adding that his paper will now publish a separate section once a week written by AI. He said he would also use AI to write the occasional article in areas where Il Foglio, a small conservative newspaper with 22 staffers, didn't have the expertise, such as a piece published on Friday on astronomy. However, he insisted AI programmes would not lead to job losses in his newsroom. "Some publishers see AI as a way to have fewer journalists and more machines. That is very wrong and self-harming. The fundamental thing is to understand what you can do more of, not less," Cerasa told a small group of foreign journalists. Cerasa said AI would create jobs for people who knew how to ask the right questions and get the most out of the technology, but predicted it would also boost high-quality journalism by forcing reporters to dig deeper and be more original. "Writers will be compelled to find new elements to be more creative and relatable," he said. Cerasa interacted daily with his AI programme and was often surprised by the results. "The most mysterious thing, the most incredible thing, was its sense of irony was immediately genuine," Cerasa said. "If you ask it to write an ironic article on any topic, AI knows how to do it." He added that the AI was also adept at producing book reviews, capable of analysing 700-page tomes and generating insightful critiques in just minutes. It needed to be told whether to give the review a positive or negative spin, which turned it into a "hitman" at the command of whoever was at the keyboard. This lack of critical thinking was a handicap, he said. "If you give a journalist guidance for an article, for me it's good to hear them say 'no', to hear them disagree with you. This discussion is fundamental but doesn't happen with AI." He also noted the occasional factual errors and said it did not always update its knowledge base, citing its persistent refusal to register that U.S. President Donald Trump had won re-election in 2024.
