In a world increasingly influenced by Artificial Intelligence, journalism is undergoing significant transformation. Just over a year ago, the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI marked a milestone akin to the invention of the printing press and the rise of the internet.

In terms of technology, AI is comparable to the advent of the Internet and social media, Julián Gallo, creator of the UalterAI tool and adviser to Argentine newspaper Clarín, said during the recent INMA Webinar Artificial Intelligence Changes Journalism Forever.

UalterAI is a news reading assistant based on Artificial Intelligence, a tool that allows you to, among other tasks, obtain news summaries or conduct searches by data and textual citations.

The expansion of Large Language Models has had a profound impact on all industries, and journalism has been particularly affected.

Gallo cites “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” as the ingredients that have kept decision-makers in media innovation stagnant, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

Since 2022, nothing has been the same due to the arrival of Artificial Intelligence in newsrooms, he said. Many of the tasks currently performed by humans will be replaced by AI in the years to come.

Gallo cites Alex Blania, CEO of Tools for Humanity, who claims that in the short to medium term, 90% of human activities will be performed or improved by AI.

He also quotes entrepreneur Elon Musk, who claims that by 2029, AI will likely be smarter than all humans combined, a phrase that Gallo adapts to journalism by saying: “By 2029, AI will be smarter than all journalists combined.”

These changes bring challenges to how online news content is produced and consumed, notes the creator of the reading tool used in alliance with Clarín.

Among the different definitions of generative Artificial Intelligence, Gallo assembled his own version: “It is the only thing that is not alive but, if I speak to it, it understands me and responds correctly. It writes better than most people, is more educated than a teacher, speaks more than 30 languages, draws and photographs like an artist, produces spectacular graphics, is always awake, does not eat, does not get angry, and does not charge or charges very little.”

A new colleague in the journalism industry

AI in media newsrooms has become a co-pilot in various tasks, such as grammar revision, editing and translating texts, fact-checking, etc., but there has been a deepening in prompt engineering; that is, how to give instructions to the robot to obtain more accurate results.

There is also an incursion into automatic generation of quality texts and efficiency in text production.

The debate about the role of AI in journalism has involved major media outlets worldwide. In Argentina, Clarín, with a clear historical leadership in print journalism, continues its tradition of innovation with the presentation of UalterAI, a reading assistant designed to enrich the reader’s experience.

UalterAI accompanies every Clarín article, offering six different ways to access information with a simple click. From a condensed summary to a classification of numerical data in columns, through the presentation of quotes and proper names in alphabetical order, the tool offers multiple alternatives to consume content.

The tool also allows users to verify or expand texts by accessing the original with just one click. Additionally, while it may eventually present partial or provisional data, it is expected that the tool will improve with use.

“This reading assistant is an acceleration tool for access and information extraction. For journalism, Artificial Intelligence opens a door to innovation where we can do things we couldn't even imagine before,” Gallo said.

Surfing an ocean of texts

Gallo pointed out that an average media outlet generates about 250 texts per day. Each of these texts has an average of 800 words, for a total of 200,000 words daily.

“That’s half of a work like ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy, which has 470,000 words,” he said.

And here comes the challenge: An average person reads at a speed of 238 words per minute. This applies for silent reading and non-fiction material. Thus, the texts that a media outlet produces daily equal 900 minutes, or 15 hours, of reading.

An analysis based on 20 minutes of daily news reading per person indicates that the time allocated to news reading is very short for the amount of content available, suggesting that much of the published content goes unread.

For this reason, a tool such as UalterAI becomes essential in news consumption, as it saves time and better organises the content the reader wants to consume by reducing the amount of text by up to 80% of its original size and intelligently extracting information.

The tool can also organise texts by key questions, extract data, present only textual quotes, glossaries with a brief explanation, chronological organisation, etc.

Something interesting is that with a single click on the summarised text, the reader can return to the original text.

Field notes

Gallo also presented the UalterAI Instant tool, which allows the field journalist to send an audio to the newsroom to be converted into an automatic article to be published in record time.

The tool is applicable to any media outlet because it will surely be used by other media companies apart from Clarín.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .