A little experiment

There was something different in last week's Ledger, however, no one really noticed.

Last week, I wrote an article using artificial intelligence (AI) software. A friend of mine from California visited recently and asked if I had ever used AI in the newspaper. I gasped and said of course not, that all our content was created by us. I then explained how the thought of AI freaks me out a little. Will it make my job obsolete as a journalist? Will no person ever write an original thought again? The short answer, in my opinion, is no.

My friend sat in my office with me and showed me AI software. I typed in a prompt and the program generated a result within minutes. The more detailed the instructions I gave, the more it bothered me. I have been a journalist for nearly 30 years. I learned ethics and the importance of attributing information. The AI software can make up anything.

So last week I did a test. Remember the spring cleaning article on page 7 (see inset below)? That was generated by software. I told it to write a 300-word journalism article about spring cleaning in Thompson Falls and quote Miriah Kardelis. She is one of my reporters, and I told her about my experiment and what I was doing before I published the article (those are my ethics kicking in that everything I publish needs to be sourced).

The article that was produced was pretty amazing. It generated quotes and attributed them to Miriah, none of which she actually said. The rest of the information was pretty basic spring cleaning information, but there were some details — such as referencing Thompson Falls as a rural area — that were a little unsettling with how much it knew.

In another experiment with the software, I prompted the program to write a two-paragraph report on journalism and quote Annie Wooden. It was a pretty good report, but as I read the two quotes it attributed to me, there were phrases that I knew I would never say. For example, one of "my" quotes was "Journalists must be tenacious in their pursuit of the truth..." Sounds very intelligent, but that's not the way I speak. I don't know if I've ever used the word tenacious in a sentence.

This was an experiment. It opened my eyes to how important it is to know where and how information is generated and to double check sources. I have no intention of ever letting AI software generate content for this newspaper. It's an important reminder of why we need journalists and people asking questions and getting information from trusted sources.

— Annie Wooden