Help us understand your opinions on the use of AI in journalism

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Recent leaps in artificial intelligence tools and large language models are rapidly changing the way people consume information. The Texas Tribune is committed to trust and transparency in all aspects of our work, including our approach to using these tools.

That’s why we want to hear from you. Take our survey to help us refine our approach.

We’ve partnered with 10 other newsrooms, as well as Trusting News, a nonprofit aimed at creating best practices around transparency in journalism, and the Online News Association to study news consumer’s opinions about the use of AI in news gathering. We’re starting with a survey to get opinions on how we should disclose the use of AI, as well as comfort levels for using AI in different contexts.

Then, a group of our journalists — photo editor/photographer Eddie Gaspar, audience producer Laura Duclos and engineering fellow Angela Voit — are sitting down one-on-one with readers to have conversations related to AI use in news gathering. Everything we learn will be shared with our partners to help guide the conversation across the industry for our journalists should approach these tools.

Please help us contribute to the conversation by taking our survey and potentially allowing us to interview you about your thoughts.

At the Tribune, we’re interested in using AI to make our content more accessible, with tools like AI-generated audio versions of stories. And we have long used AI as an efficiency tool to transcribe interviews and public meetings for internal use, with journalists always verifying published quotes.

Earlier this year, we shared our AI policies. These policies may evolve as our approach does — and would be heavily influenced by the research we’re doing now.

Here are our policies:

AI requires journalistic oversight.

• The Texas Tribune will not use AI to replace our journalists, who do essential, original and intensive work gathering and reporting news on politics and policy.
• We will not publish text generated by AI tools unless it has gone through a rigorous verification and editing process. And our journalists will not use information from generative tools as a primary source of information.
• Journalists will disclose to their editors if they used tools such as ChatGPT in the reporting process. They will be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI tools, including how AI introduces uncertainty about where information comes from. They will disclose how they independently confirmed any information they learned by using AI tools.
• Cautious experimentation with AI tools is encouraged in the newsroom.
• Tribune journalists may experiment with AI tools for tasks such as data analysis, transcription, headline/SEO and social platform writing, but they must be critical of the tools. They will treat AI-generated output as unverified information and work to independently verify it.
• Journalists will avoid putting confidential information such as anonymous source names or privately obtained documents into third-party AI tools.

We will disclose how we use AI.

• When AI tools play a role in developing key findings in a story, such as through a data analysis, we will clearly disclose how the tools were used.
• If we build journalism products that rely on AI tools to generate published information for readers, such as a chatbot or interactive module, we will disclose the usage of these tools and add context to clarify the role of AI in the product.
• We will not use AI to generate images for news stories.
• We do not alter any elements of photos, video or audio. This means we do not publish news photographs created by or manipulated by generative AI. In cases where AI-generated images are the newsworthy subject of a story, we will clearly label them as such with a watermark and caption.

Our journalism is not always AI source material.

• The Tribune may selectively block some AI technologies from “scraping” the Tribune website to add training data for their models. We will review these tools on a case-by-case basis to determine the benefits and drawbacks of preventing these agents from using our journalism in their products.

AI tools may be used for production of non-journalistic content.

• Tribune staff on the marketing, communications, product, revenue, operations and other non-editorial teams are encouraged to experiment with AI tools for tasks such as copywriting assistance, automation of workflows and business efficiency
• Before utilizing a new AI tool, individuals should openly discuss and disclose their usage with their manager. And everyone should have a close eye on the security and accuracy of information.

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