FROM THE EDITOR: AI isn't going away, and Gazette journalists aren't either (2024)

Artificial intelligence is changing everything. It’s everywhere now, and it’s amazing.

I have an old grape vine running along a fence in my backyard and when its leaves started yellowing, I got concerned. I found a website where I could upload a photo of a leaf and in three seconds I received a specific fertilizer recommendation. It even told me where in town I could buy the fertilizer. And, it worked, the vine is healthy again.

All that information, and it was correct information, came in seconds, with no human interaction, and at no cost. Somewhere a lonesome county extension agent is saying, “I used to get those calls.”

AI is revolutionizing entire professions, rendering some of them obsolete, like bookkeepers, cashiers, receptionists, clerks, paralegals, and translators. I haven’t used a travel agent since the internet was invented.

Like every great creation, AI is being used as much for evil as it is good. I haven’t had a decent customer service interaction since the machines took over, and look at all the harm caused by AI-generated lies on social media.

Like most professions, journalism is working to figure out its place with AI.

The research and analysis possibilities are revolutionary. It took a French scholar 23 years to decipher the Rosetta Stone, something any journalist could do now in 23 seconds.

At the New York Times, reporters covering the war in Gaza have been using AI to track satellite images of bomb craters. The reporting has helped hold the conflicting governments accountable and helped sustain the global call for a ceasefire.

Jared Schroeder, a journalism professor, told the Voice of America it “would have taken an army of journalists a long time to examine that much satellite data. It's almost a story that wouldn't exist without AI.”

Same with the Panama Papers scandal, in which journalists exposed how some of the world’s wealthiest people were using offshore accounts to commit billions in tax fraud and hide from government sanctions.

Those papers were contained in a 2.6 terabyte leak, about 650 million pages of information, the VOA reported. There isn’t an army of researchers big enough to analyze that much data.

The Billings Gazette newsroom is slowly, carefully, dipping a toe into AI. Lee Enterprises, the Gazette’s parent company, which owns 77 daily newspapers in 26 states, has issued clear policy guidelines to all employees. We’re not winging it here.

Currently, some Gazette reporters use AI to transcribe interviews and recordings from government meetings, which saves hours of tedious work. And recently, we had a reporter search obscure, intentionally buried federal records to spot patterns in energy production at the Colstrip power plant. We also use AI to post some of our website’s news content— all of it produced by real human journalists— to our social media platforms, and of course every time we google something we’re using AI.

Here’s what will never happen at the Gazette. We will never trust AI. We’ll never publish anything that isn’t checked and double-checked by the real people here who do the hard work of community journalism. We’ll never publish a photo or video that’s gotten anywhere near AI.

We are and always will be in the talking-to-people business. One of our intern's biggest projects this summer was finding out out why many Bozeman fliers pay less for airfare than Billings fliers. He also looked into who uses the state's heavily subsidized Essential Air Service.

While he spent much time at his deck researching doing research, he also went to the airport where he talked to people, got on an airplane where he talked to more people, and spent two days in a small Montana town dependent on air travel where all he did was talk to people.

That’s how this business works. Important news rarely comes from a press release. It comes from reporters talking to people wherever they are. It comes from empathy and outrage, from a sense of justice and community service, from curiosity and sound judgement, all things that AI will never be good at.

So count on this, no matter how much AI transforms the world around us, the one thing that won’t change at the Gazette is having real reporters gathering the news from real people and sharing it with the community we live in.