The siren wails, a sign of distress,
An ambulance speeds through the city’s bustling mess.
Responding to a call, a task at hand,
Helping those in need, across the land.
“The above poem [there are four more stanzas]—which beautifully captures a 911 response—was, surprisingly, not written by a human,” wrote 2022 Neal Award winner Rachel Engel of Lexipol on their EMS1 site. “Instead, it was generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT using the prompt, ‘Write a poem about EMS providers responding to a 911 call in an ambulance.’ While the poem won’t win any literary awards, it’s still impressive for a chatbot. And, used creatively, ChatGPT can even assist first responders on the job in certain instances.”
We’ve all seen amazing examples like this by now. (Knowing I write clever birthday poems, my engineering friends send me one every week.) The benefits of ChatGPT compared to traditional methods are enormous. But the picture is not all rosy—editorial use needs to be overseen.
This week we saw, in a MediaPost article about another AM&P Network member—Future’s Tom’s Hardware—an instance where editor in chief Avram Piltch caught Google Bard plagiarizing from a story they wrote. “The answer it gave [to his processor question] was taken directly from one of our Tom’s Hardware articles, but Bard didn’t mention the article…” Bard later admitted to the plagiarism.
Norwegian publication Schibsted News found “37+ ways it can help,” wrote Johannes Gorset, their director of engineering for VG, on INMA. But they also found that in one of “our experiments, one in 10 machine-generated summaries contain ‘hallucinations,’ or stuff it just made up… In the long run, I think we need to build media organizations where working with data to fine-tune or even train machine learning models is about as common as writing code.”
The ways AI can assist us in our editorial jobs will only escalate as we learn more. A Northern Virginia high school student just won $175,000 by using artificial intelligence to “examine a very real issue—who gets humanized by the media after a homicide happens and who doesn’t—and in doing so, she made something that is hard to measure measurable.” So data should even become more valuable with AI.
Here are eight positive ways to use AI. We’ll also be having an Editorial Council Meeting on AI coming up soon, and it will be a Mainstage topic at our AMPLIFY 2023 conference in Washington, D.C., June 27-28.
These three examples of ChatGPT assistance come from Engel (pictured here):
Add humor. “When you’ve got a tiny patient in your rig that you need to distract from the stitches they’re receiving or to alleviate concerns for mom or dad, it helps to have a joke in your back pocket… Yep, ChatGPT can do that, too.”
Request: “Tell me a joke about paramedics.”
Response: “Why did the paramedic carry a red pen? In case they needed to draw blood!”
Make the complicated simple. “ChatGPT can help break down complex medical processes into simple terms that can give patients peace of mind.” For example: “In simple terms, explain how an ECG machine works and what it can tell health workers.”
Generate messaging. ChatGPT can help generate safety messaging content to be distributed to the community or help to educate community members about what EMS does. Consider how the chatbot can assist with preparations for certain events, such as the daily EMS Week themes, by creating digestible information in lay terms that can be customized by age. For example: “Explain to a 5-year-old what paramedics do.” Theme weeks in niche media are becoming more prevalent, so this could be a big help.
Create headlines. “I’ve used ChatGPT as an engine for generating and challenging headlines,” says Andreas Markmann, a Danish journalist. “So if we make a headline for a story, we can ask ChatGPT to make 10 headlines that it thinks will work better.”
Find keywords and analyze websites. ChatGPT can be used for ideation, planning and campaign optimization. If you are running a campaign, it is a helpful tool for researching keywords, creating ad text, and building a landing page. It can also give you an idea of how to analyze your competitor’s website.
And finally, here are three from ChatGPT itself:
I can analyze text data, such as customer reviews or social media posts, to understand the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of the text. This can be helpful for understanding how customers feel about a product or service.
I can translate text from one language to another, which can be helpful for creating marketing materials in multiple languages or for understanding customer feedback.
I can summarize long pieces of text, such as articles or reports, into shorter, more digestible summaries.
