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Generative AI is expected to radically transform the way newsroom personnel work — that is, if it doesn’t take their jobs away completely. Discourse about the dangers that generative AI may bring to journalism coursed through TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum last week, particularly during the panel “Chasing AI: Threatening Or Enhancing The News?” But before acknowledging some of the work being done to address potential doom-and-gloom scenarios, the panelists first outlined how the technology is already improving news production.
Ray Thompson, senior director of partners and alliances at Avid, said AI’s assistance with transcript creation has already proven valuable. Not only does it construct word-for-word transcripts, but it also produces summaries of interviews, allowing TV news producers to make quicker decisions about which portions of the footage to use in stories. Thompson added that the tech can then churn out a new transcript for a finished package, locate where key phrases were said within it and drop permanent markers onto it to aid in searches. He also said that Avid recently added a “mix searches” feature to its MediaCentral platform, allowing users to combine metadata and phonetic searches into one.
“It’s driving efficiencies,” said Thompson about gen AI. “It’s basically making things go faster, and hopefully allowing you to … deliver more content and deliver at scale and do so much faster.”
From the publisher’s perspective, Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, said that her organization has leveraged AI for nearly a decade. Starting in 2014,