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‘Lean In. Test These Things Out.’ A Lot Is Being Written by and About AI; Here’s Some Help

by Media

In March CEO Nicholas Thompson wrote a note to his Atlantic business-side staff about AI. “The first point I want to make is that we should all be curious. Lean in. Test these things out. We will be getting some company subscriptions to GPT-4… Secondly, I want us to experiment.” Joe Amditis, who has written a publishers ChatGPT guide, said, “If we don’t pay attention to this… we’re going to get tricked ourselves, and we’re going to lose credibility with our audiences.” It’s a lot to navigate right now.

I just looked at an impressive, though a bit impersonal, video posted on LinkedIn by Jeremiah Owyang. He gave this prompt to AI: “Write a short story, in first person, about a girl moves to the big city, launches a business, overcomes challenges, and finally succeeds. 300 words.”

He then spent a brief time selecting video clips and music. “I wrote zero of the script. I estimate it would have taken me 20-30 hours to create; it took 15 minutes.”

Reactions ranged from: You can now add to it (drop it into munch or opus, then use Midjourney to create an avatar and ChatGPT for the description); to outrage (“We are going to be flooded with fake human experiences!”); to it’s crazy what we can now do.

Flooded is probably the right word for where we are now in AI-land. At our Editorial Council meeting in April we heard from one editorial director who’s all in on letting AI create stories and another who, for now, is committed just to tasks such as ideating and reading through gobs of text to come up with questions. Others are learning and much more wary of potential accuracy, ethical and bias problems.

(I’m planning for the next Editorial Council meeting to take place on June 22 about editorial uses for AI. Stay tuned.)

Meanwhile, here are five resources that I’ve come across:

Experiment. Join the waiting list for Bard, wrote The Atlantic’s Thompson. Try Poe and Bing. Read about Anthropic. See if you can get human hands to look good in MidJourney five. Learn how to be a good prompt engineer… We’re already trying to use these systems to help tag stories. Next, maybe we can build a bot to help us onboard new subscribers. Maybe we can build a bot that helps guide people to the archives. Maybe we can create a more efficient and personalized recommendation engine…”

A full-on test case. On NiemanLab last week, new staff writer Sophie Culpepper wrote this excellent story: “Can AI help local newsrooms streamline their newsletters? ARLnow tests the waters.” Scott Brodbeck is the founder of Virginia-based media company Local News Now. He already had an automated afternoon newsletter but wanted “a morning email with more voice. [He] began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.” Now he wants to do a daily update on YouTube and is “experimenting with using AI to look for typos and other errors in newly published articles; categorize articles into positive, neutral and negative buckets for potential social media purposes; and drive a chatbot to help clients write sponsored articles.”

An AI for Editorial handbook. Joe Amditis, an assistant director for products and events at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, has put out the “Beginner’s prompt handbook: ChatGPT for local news publishers.” The guide takes users through creating the best prompts; talks technology terms; tells how to clean up transcripts and create outlines to “red-team” your story ideas. It also advises how to use AI as institutional memory for your newsroom. “Picture this,” Amditis writes in an article on Medium. “An AI model trained on your newsroom’s archives and its entire body of work, along with any of the other community- or org-specific reports, information, documentation, and data you can find and upload. By analyzing this vast trove of data, an LLM could identify patterns and connections that might not be immediately apparent to human analysts.”

Hugging Face? Why not. Earlier this month, Team Twipe put out this article: “Navigating the AI Dust Storm: A guide for publishers.” There are full definitions of concepts and tools like Hugging Face, which “allows you to locally download multiple LLM models and provides datasets to train them​. It also provides courses and educational materials​.” And it had this tidbit: “OpenAI has recently introduced a new function called ‘Code Interpreter’ that allows users to upload and download files such as tables or code and use GPT-4 to evaluate, modify, and save them locally…”

Tests show inconsistency. On The Atlantic site, Ian Bogost wrote this article: “We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article. It’s Weird. Please don’t embarrass us, robots.” “So I started testing some ideas on ChatGPT (the website) to explore how we might integrate ChatGPT (the API),” he writes. “One idea: a simple search engine that would surface Atlantic stories about a requested topic… In some of my tests, ChatGPT’s responses were coherent, incorporating ideas nimbly. In others, they were hackneyed or incoherent. There’s no telling which variety will appear above. If you refresh the page a few times, you’ll see what I mean.” One thing is for sure, Bogost writes, “You can no longer assume that any of the words you see were created by a human being.”

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SIIA Statement on Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google Supreme Court Decisions

by Policy

In response to today’s Supreme Court decision on Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google, Chris Mohr, President, Software & Information Industry Association issues the following statement.

“Today was a good day for the open Internet and the business of information.  The Supreme Court, in its decisions in Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google, preserved the ability of responsible platforms to both operate at scale and engage in robust content moderation. We are pleased with the result.”

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You Need to ‘Understand Your Audience’; Industry Dive Leaders Preview AMPLIFY Talk

by AMPLIFY 2023Media

“What Industry Dive has been good at is never putting all our eggs in one basket, especially for reaching people and growing our audience,” said Sondra Hadden, their senior director of audience growth marketing. “But how you do that feels very different these days than it did 10 years ago.” Hadden and editor in chief Davide Savenije will wax audience-centric on June 27 at our AMPLIFY event in Washington, D.C. Here’s a preview.

“The most effective way to reach your audience goals is to collaborate cross-functionally,” Savenije told my colleague Kathryn Deen recently. “One of the things I really like about Industry Dive is how we’ve set up the collaboration between audience and editorial to integrate the audience function into the newsroom workflow and vice versa, as opposed to being siloed, which is the case in a lot of B2B media companies.

“If you’re on your own, there’s a lot of missed opportunities in understanding your audience, where to meet them, and how to expose them to your brand and get them to convert, whatever your model may be.”

Savenije and Hadden will present a Main Stage session titled, The Fast-Evolving Guide to Audience Engagement, June 27 at AMPLIFY 2023—AM&P Network’s Content & Marketing Summit—at the National Housing Center here in Washington, D.C. (The event runs June 27-28. See the agenda here and registration information here.)

Industry Dive continues to hum along with a newsroom of about 140 journalists, many of them mid-career, putting out 30-plus business publications. Their latest new daily edition, Facilities Dive, focusing on building operations, will land in inboxes on June 5. It’s the fourth newsletter Industry Dive has launched in 2023, following Fashion Dive, Hotel Dive and Packaging Dive. (B2B giant Informa purchased Industry Dive last year for $530 million.)

“Audience engagement is always incredibly important, so understanding your audience—having that strong relationship with them and the content you produce—is key,” said Savenije, who has been with Industry Dive for 11 years, six of those as editor in chief. “One of the reasons to do this session now is that there’s so much changing in the world and the business and media landscape at a rapid rate. So you really have to stay on top of change and how you evolve and meet people where they are in the communities you’re trying to reach.”

Hadden, who has been with Industry Dive for two years—she previously worked at the American Chemical Society and the Biotechnology Industry Organization—leads a team of five that manages paid and organic media campaigns. “We work very closely with Davide, as well as design and product, so we’re a cross-departmental team,” she told Deen.

“My team supports all the publications, so we have to drive growth and retention across the board. It’s perfect to have an asset like the newsroom that can tell you so much about each audience they’re writing for. Then there’s the next step of how you get your readers to do something; that’s where the marketing expertise comes in. It’s the perfect relationship.”

Industry Dive was one of the first media organizations to use accessible dashboards to share insights company-wide—enabling editors and marketers to make informed decisions that drive growth. They also made sure to help editorial people how to interpret those dashboards.

“It is about how you position yourself, how you maintain that philosophy of understanding your audience, listening to your audience, meeting them where they are, bringing them into your ecosystem, and developing that relationship,” Savenije said. “We hope people can come out of this session with some helpful insights into defining your vision and strategy, and then fitting your tactics into that.”

Added Hadden: “It boils down to having the conversation between the teams: Who are you trying to reach? Has it changed? Why? How? It’s about getting all your stakeholders in the room and not thinking of these departments as separate. We’ll provide examples of what Industry Dive has done to accomplish this, but whether you’re a small association or a larger company, there will be pieces that you can pull into your own goals.”

AMPLIFY 2023 takes place June 27-28 at the National Housing Center in Washington, D.C. This is one event not to be missed!

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Blogs, DEI Surveys and Actions, and Bias Training Propel ACOFP to IMPACT Award

by IMPACT AwardsMedia

It started on June 14, 2020, when ACOFP released the statement “Actions Speak Louder Than Words”—authored by then-President Robert C. DeLuca—committing to sustainable change within the organization. This included: assembly of the Task Force on DEI; an enhanced focus on DEI educational programming; and opportunities for members to engage in dialogue. More positive changes and an SIIA IMPACT Award followed.

“When looking at differences among patient populations and finding the best ways in which to customize treatment options, we as physicians need to take a step back to understand the varying racial, ethnic and cultural differences from which our patients come.”

That’s the first paragraph from a blog post in a series highlighting the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians’ (ACOFP) 2023 Annual Convention speakers. Their DEI Blog Content Development Team has provided a forum to share personal stories and create meaningful content across their diverse communities. To date, there have been close to 50 member-generated blog posts on DEI topics.

This is just one of the actions that led to ACOFP becoming a beacon of shining light on the DEI horizon over the last three years—and being named an 2022 SIIA IMPACT Equity Team Award winner.

Over the last three years, ACOFP has seen: advancements on the legislative and regulatory front; a re-envisioned Annual Convention keynote experience to showcase diverse viewpoints; a Face of the Family Photo Campaign with more than 300 submissions; bylaws changes to increase leadership opportunities; mandatory implicit bias training for all staff and committee members; an association-wide DEI survey leading to 15 recommendations; DEI Awards with a stipend of $2,500; and a dedicated member profile update campaign.

Not bad for a staff team of less than 20. We conducted a Q&A with ACOFP to shine further light on their accomplishments (thanks to Paige Zelinsky, program and development manager, for coordinating this):

AMPLIFY: Has ACOFP seen more meaningful stories and content come to light through the Blog Team’s efforts?
ACOFP: Yes! This corner of our blog continues to show the breadth of our members’ experiences. Most recently, we shared a series of three blog posts that showcase our 2023 Annual Convention speakers:

Healthcare for the LGBTQIA+ Community
Analyzing Racial Cardiology Disparities in Healthcare
Cultural Differences in Healthcare

This year’s keynote topic was “Advancing Medicine through Diverse Leadership,” and we partnered with a company, InkFactory, to visually depict the conversation between our ACOFP President, David Park, and AAFP President, Tochi Iroku-Malize. These visuals live on the ACOFP blog and social media channels.

What results have the DEI surveys yielded?
While historically ACOFP has offered a number of DEI-related programs and education, our journey to embed DEI in all that we do really began in 2021. As part of this launch, we partnered with an external group to assess member perceptions of the organization regarding DEI to have a baseline understanding of where we were starting.

The overall DEI Index (average score on the survey) was 80.17%. Overall, this score indicates that, on average, most survey participants responded positively to the questions on the survey (agreed to some degree with the positively worded survey questions). The survey results and findings were presented to the Task Force on DEI, who then divided into their three subcommittee groups (Governance, Education, and Community Outreach) to further discuss the findings and recommendations, and to prioritize the results and next steps.

The Task Force then developed 15 DEI recommendations that were approved by the ACOFP Board of Governors in 2021. Now that we are a year and a half into those recommendations being approved, we have been able to recognize tangible results, with 9 of our 15 recommendations implemented into our standard book of business. These improvements and initiatives include illustrating our various pathways to leadership to reduce barriers that are real or perceived, developing a calendar of cultural celebrations and implementing a communications plan to raise awareness, and hosting a community storytelling workshop to share experiences of overcoming implicit bias.

ACOFP will conduct another DEI benchmarking survey in early 2024.

Has the implicit bias training continued?
Yes, in 2021, our Task Force on DEI recognized that one training session related to implicit bias is not sufficient. As ACOFP has aimed to embed DEI in all that we do as an organization, conducting regular training for our leadership is now part of our operating policy and required by our committee members. This year, we have over 300 committee members on 60+ committees taking a course titled, “Micro Aggressions in the Workplace.” 2023 will be the second year that we have required this training, and we are eager to see how this mechanism will positively impact our organizations inclusivity in the long-term.

Have more DEI Awards been given out internally?
Yes! We have an ACOFP Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award (DEI) which has been given out annually since 2021. This award recognizes osteopathic family physicians who make significant contributions toward enhancing DEI within the profession, honoring those who have demonstrated behaviors or led initiatives that foster these principles within diverse and underrepresented communities. Our most recent ACOFP DEI award was given in April of 2023 to Salvatore J. Biazzo, who is involved in a number of initiatives relating to LGBTQ+ health care at University of Nevada Las Vegas, including developing the UNLV multidisciplinary Transgender Care Team, which won a University Award for Outstanding Wellness Program in 2022.

 

 

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SIIA Opposition to Alabama HB 298

by Policy

We are writing to express the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) opposition to HB 298.

We appreciate the intent of the sponsors to enact policies that protect children and teenagers in Alabama from inappropriate content online. We acknowledge and support the broad agreement by state and federal lawmakers about the need to protect children’s privacy and safety. We agree that establishing legal guardrails for businesses is important. However, we are concerned that the approach reflected in HB 298 is technologically unfeasible, will not solve the concerns that animated the legislation, and will create new problems that require further attention by the Alabama legislature and the courts.

Device manufacturers and software providers have developed a range of content filtering and blocking solutions that enable parents to protect their children from accessing inappropriate content and empower parents to set limitations on how their children use mobile devices and the internet. These tools provide parents (and other consumers) with ways to block children from accessing particular services, applications, and websites, to manage children’s online accounts, and to monitor children’s online usage.

These tools require some level of consumer (e.g., parental) involvement, because it is not technologically feasible to install a “switch” that automatically blocks certain groups of consumers (e.g., minors) from accessing content across the internet and any number of online applications that meet certain criteria. HB 298’s requirement that device manufacturers embed all new devices with a filtering mechanism that automatically detects and blocks a minor from accessing any harmful content calls for technology that does not exist and is not possible.

Even were the technological requirements of HB 298 possible, we would remain concerned about how HB 298 makes device manufacturers responsible for determining what constitutes content harmful to minors. This includes interpreting phrases subject to multiple meanings, such as “patently offensive” and “prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole.” We fear that applying the terms of HB 298 would inevitably generate public outcry from those concerned that a device manufacturer has inadvertently blocked lawful content or inadvertently failed to block inappropriate content. This creates significant legal risk that may ultimately cause device manufacturers to reconsider providing products and services to residents of Alabama.

An alternative approach, such as the one contained in HB 441 and in legislation that recently took effect in Louisiana, provides a workable solution that will help to achieve the goals of the HB 298 sponsors. This approach puts the onus on the publishers and distributors of material harmful to minors, rather than on the manufacturer of devices that may be used to access that content. In addition, we urge further education of parents and other consumers about the availability of already available tools, such as content filters, that empower parents to set parameters for their children’s use of the internet.

Thank you for considering our views.

Letter to Alabama House of Representatives
Letter to Senate Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Development Committee