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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.”
