The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPT

Matteo Wong, writing for The Atlantic, interviewed Claudio Cerasa, editor of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio about his use of AI tools and how they are evolving his paper:

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.