A new AI tool could help journalists navigate the flood of pitches, tips and press releases they receive daily..In Hoboken, New Jersey, Stevens School of Business researcher, Jeff Nickerson, co-developed, evaluated and unveiled a new tool to help reporters find more interesting angles and relevant context in the information they receive. .The tool, known as AngleKindling, was unveiled at an April computing conference in Germany by a four-university team. The system was tested with Open AI's GPT-3 large-language model..“The tools of AI can be turned to positive or negative uses and brainstorming is one of the truly positive use cases,” explains Nickerson, an expert in human-computer interactions whose work is featured at the Stevens Institute at Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). .“While AI doesn’t generate better articles than skilled human writers, it can help journalists with ideation.”.Researchers from Columbia and Syracuse universities collaborated directly with Nickerson in the NSF-funded project to understand how AI can be used to extract relevant concepts from press releases, suggest new lines of inquiry, questions and potential hot-button issues and provide both historical context and further reading. .The research team began by spending three months meeting with a group of four professional journalists, observing their processes for ideating stories from tips, press releases and other sources. The group also reached out to researchers at Northwestern University working on similar tools..“We wanted to observe journalists working with AI tools. AI tools are different from other kinds of tools, in that it can take time to figure out what they are capable of and how those capabilities can be applied,” says Nickerson..Four key needs emerged from those meetings: the imperative to cut through spin and concisely summarize the pertinent facts included in press releases; the generation of novel story angles; identification of potential controversies and conflicts related to the statements in releases and; a rapid summary of relevant sources such as previous news stories written about similar topics..Armed with this intel, the research team then created and trained its new large-language model, using OpenAI's GPT-3 and carefully directed prompts designed to achieve those four goals by (for example) extracting the five most useful keywords from each press release it scanned in the study, then searching archives of The New York Times for the most relevant previous content around those five keywords. .The AI that eventually emerged scans press releases and identifies both the core facts and potential negative outcomes in the information. It also collects working links to high-quality news articles for browsing to get up to speed on a topic. And it suggests questions and interesting new lines of inquiry to a reporter..All in a few seconds. .A follow-up study by the team asked 12 more professional reporters to use AngleKindling as they worked to create story ideas with a sample set of press releases, comparing its suggestions with the ideas generated by INJECT (a leading idea-generation tool for journalists). .In surveys, journalists said the new system was more useful and less time-consuming than INJECT and generated more varied types of story ideas..“We found that AngleKindling was perceived to be significantly more helpful for coming up with ideas, with significantly less mental demand,” wrote the team in a summary for conference participants, by “helping journalists recognize angles they had not considered... providing angles that were useful for multiple types of stories... helping journalists quickly and deeply engage with the press release, and... providing [related content and] context.”.Nickerson’s work will continue. His team is now working with OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 as well as additional language models from Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
A new AI tool could help journalists navigate the flood of pitches, tips and press releases they receive daily..In Hoboken, New Jersey, Stevens School of Business researcher, Jeff Nickerson, co-developed, evaluated and unveiled a new tool to help reporters find more interesting angles and relevant context in the information they receive. .The tool, known as AngleKindling, was unveiled at an April computing conference in Germany by a four-university team. The system was tested with Open AI's GPT-3 large-language model..“The tools of AI can be turned to positive or negative uses and brainstorming is one of the truly positive use cases,” explains Nickerson, an expert in human-computer interactions whose work is featured at the Stevens Institute at Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). .“While AI doesn’t generate better articles than skilled human writers, it can help journalists with ideation.”.Researchers from Columbia and Syracuse universities collaborated directly with Nickerson in the NSF-funded project to understand how AI can be used to extract relevant concepts from press releases, suggest new lines of inquiry, questions and potential hot-button issues and provide both historical context and further reading. .The research team began by spending three months meeting with a group of four professional journalists, observing their processes for ideating stories from tips, press releases and other sources. The group also reached out to researchers at Northwestern University working on similar tools..“We wanted to observe journalists working with AI tools. AI tools are different from other kinds of tools, in that it can take time to figure out what they are capable of and how those capabilities can be applied,” says Nickerson..Four key needs emerged from those meetings: the imperative to cut through spin and concisely summarize the pertinent facts included in press releases; the generation of novel story angles; identification of potential controversies and conflicts related to the statements in releases and; a rapid summary of relevant sources such as previous news stories written about similar topics..Armed with this intel, the research team then created and trained its new large-language model, using OpenAI's GPT-3 and carefully directed prompts designed to achieve those four goals by (for example) extracting the five most useful keywords from each press release it scanned in the study, then searching archives of The New York Times for the most relevant previous content around those five keywords. .The AI that eventually emerged scans press releases and identifies both the core facts and potential negative outcomes in the information. It also collects working links to high-quality news articles for browsing to get up to speed on a topic. And it suggests questions and interesting new lines of inquiry to a reporter..All in a few seconds. .A follow-up study by the team asked 12 more professional reporters to use AngleKindling as they worked to create story ideas with a sample set of press releases, comparing its suggestions with the ideas generated by INJECT (a leading idea-generation tool for journalists). .In surveys, journalists said the new system was more useful and less time-consuming than INJECT and generated more varied types of story ideas..“We found that AngleKindling was perceived to be significantly more helpful for coming up with ideas, with significantly less mental demand,” wrote the team in a summary for conference participants, by “helping journalists recognize angles they had not considered... providing angles that were useful for multiple types of stories... helping journalists quickly and deeply engage with the press release, and... providing [related content and] context.”.Nickerson’s work will continue. His team is now working with OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 as well as additional language models from Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
