About Stuff’s AI assisted summaries and AI policy
Thursday, 31 October 2024
If you see a badge on Stuff’s Fast Facts article summaries that says “AI assisted summary”, here’s all the information about what that means.
What are Fast Facts?
We know you’re busy, so at the top of many Stuff stories you’ll find a box called Fast Facts. The Fast Facts are three bulletpoints summarising the main points of the article to give you an initial overview of it. They’re written by the journalist who produced the entire story, or the editor who published it.
What does it mean when Fast Facts is marked as “AI assisted summary”?
Transparency is one of the fundamental principles in our AI policy at Stuff, so we use this badge to show you that AI helped generate those three bulletpoints from the original article. Because ‘human oversight and fact checking’ is the other core principle of our AI policy, the journalist who writes the article, and the editor who publishes it, will both check the Fast Facts against the original story to ensure their accuracy, (whether they’re AI assisted or not).
So the process is:
A journalist researches, interviews, fact checks and writes their article.
When it’s ready for publication, they can choose to run our AI tool over it to suggest some summary sentences for Fast Facts.
The AI suggests draft summaries, based on the content of the original reporting and specific prompts we’ve designed.
The journalist can choose to use the suggestions from the AI in Fast Facts. If they do, they always check the facts against their story and edit them as needed before adding them to the top.
The editor who publishes the story will also read and check both the Fast Facts and the whole story, as per our usual editorial processes.
Why do some Fast Facts not include the badge?
If the journalist writing the story chooses to write their own Fast Facts summary from scratch, and does not engage the AI to create the drafts, the summary won’t include the AI assisted badge. We believe it’s really important to distinguish when something is entirely original and when it has had AI input.
Is the rest of the story AI?
Absolutely not. The AI assisted summary badge on Fast Facts applies only to those short bulletpoint summaries at the top of the story. The rest of the content is entirely original reporting.
How else does Stuff use AI?
As outlined in this AI policy update, AI tools can enhance journalism and the experience for audiences while improving productivity, but with that comes some risks worth considering.
We never use AI to do the job of a journalist - researching, interviewing, fact checking and original writing. What we’ve been exploring are ways we can use AI to make a journalist’s job easier, by creating efficiencies and removing repetitive tasks. Some examples and things we’ve been trying include:
Interview transcription
Summarisations
Video shot listing
Feed automation, curation and personalisation
SEO optimisation
Marketing automation
Automated page templating
Story ideation
Automated templated stories for results and data eg financial results and sports results
Voice to text, text to voice
Primary source and data scanning, distillation and summarising
Image recognition and text key-word scanning
Social media scanning
Automated cataloguing, indexing and storage of written, visual, audio and video content
Translation of stories into languages including te reo Māori
Data analysis and visualisation.
As noted above, any time something has been generated or substantially generated using generative AI, it will be transparently labelled.
All our content, AI assisted or otherwise, must adhere to the requirements of New Zealand law and the principles of the New Zealand Media Council, Advertising Standards Authority and to Stuff’s Editorial Code of Practice and Ethics and Stuff’s Charter.