Imagine if every time you came across an interesting news article, you could immediately reach out to the journalist who wrote it to ask questions and discuss the material. That’s the idea presented by Jim Albrecht, former senior director of Google News, in a recent op-ed for The Washington Post.
Albrecht believes that modern large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, will revolutionize the news industry just like the internet did in the early 2000s. Before the internet, people relied on television and print news media for information. While these traditional formats still exist today, their influence has been diminished by the rise of web-based news sites.
In the past, if you wanted to check a sports score or find a local seller for a specific item, you would turn to the relevant section of your local newspaper. But now, you can simply visit a website and click on a link to get the information you need.
However, according to Albrecht, although the web has transformed the distribution of news articles, the articles themselves have remained largely unchanged. That is, until now. In November 2022, OpenAI launched its ChatGPT LLM service, allowing users to prompt the bot to retrieve information from sources prior to 2021.
Fast forward a little over a year, and ChatGPT (along with similar models) can access current news articles from the internet. More importantly, these LLMs can rephrase and summarize information from various sources, delivering aggregated news to users in a single interaction.
Albrecht believes that this shift will lead to a new revolution in journalism. Instead of moving the media to a more accessible platform, news readers will shift their attention from static news articles to interactive journalism experiences led by ChatGPT-style chatbots. Albrecht predicts that readers of the future may prefer to get their news from AI sources that can engage in “conversations” about the articles, as opposed to humans who cannot interact with millions of people simultaneously.
It’s worth noting that Big Tech has been predicting the demise of traditional print/online journalism since 2015, when Facebook shifted its focus to video. However, by 2017, many newsrooms that attempted to transition to video had discovered that reports of the death of online print media were greatly exaggerated.
Since then, models like ChatGPT have gained popularity, and numerous news outlets have experimented with using AI to generate articles. While some of these trials have been successful, especially those that operate with full disclosure, many have led to embarrassment and alienated established readers due to mistakes and a lack of transparency.
Related: Legal experts provide insights on the landmark NYT vs. OpenAI and Microsoft lawsuit.