Meet Claude: ABC’s new regional cadet journalist

The ABC is using AI to write stories — a journalist who doesn’t have time to do it themselves, points to an under-resourced newsroom, writes Dale Webster.

THE AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING COMMISSION (ABC) is rolling out news stories written by artificial intelligence, but only in its regional newsrooms.

The move has been confirmed by an ABC media spokeswoman who said the pilot program, which uses technology powered by Anthropic’s Claude tool:

“enhances our service for regional audiences, enabling them to access this journalism online.”

She said the use of artificial intelligence (AI) was declared, with readers pointed to an article that explains the stories were produced with “journalist oversight”.

“The local news briefings convert original stories written by ABC journalists for regional radio bulletins into digital briefings to make them available to online audiences across the day,” she said.

The radio scripts are written for the spoken word, so are not appropriate for publishing in their original format on the ABC website, with the ABC acknowledging that the process of re-purposing content in this way is “time-consuming”.

Any print journalist or sub-editor who has had to pull back original copy into 100-word briefs in a different style, without losing context or clarity, to a tight deadline will attest to this.

It is a demonstration of skill as a writer and editor, not a party trick.

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The longer someone has been in the profession, the better they are at it, but the work is great training for a young journalist even if they are a little slower.

Above: Warning — AI-generated content (Screenshot ABC website)

The ABC has come relatively late to the serious craft of writing for print publication.

Where once ABC journalists had to only focus on writing for radio or television, they now have to produce content for multiple platforms, with regional journalists, who often work alone or in very small teams, under the most pressure of all.

This is where the question the ABC spokeswoman would not answer – why AI is only being used for this purpose in regional newsrooms – becomes important.

In addressing the question, would the ABC have to admit the decision to introduce AI content is about workforce capacity?

Using AI to write stories because a journalist doesn’t have time to do it themselves points to an under-resourced newsroom.

That opens a whole new can of worms and brings the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), into the picture.

The MEAA is clear in its position:

“media companies should not use artificial intelligence-generated tools to reduce employment opportunities for journalists”.

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The local news briefings being written using AI and published each day on the ABC website are new.

Presumably, they were not produced in the past because journalists in regional newsrooms did not have time for this extra work during a shift due to the time and skill it required.

The spokeswoman justified the use of AI because it was:

“bringing more regional stories to audiences”.

Couldn’t the ABC do this by employing more journalists?

Or by putting a cadet into every regional bureau?

If the ABC continues down this path, it needs to be much clearer about its use of AI by including taglines that state “this content has been generated by AI”, not, as is now the case, a hot link to a propaganda piece on how “ABC News is bringing more regional stories to audiences using AI with journalist oversight”.

At a time when independent print media is holding the line against AI use in publishing, this move by the publicly funded ABC is unpalatable and tests public trust.

Dale Webster was named the Walkley Foundation’s 2022 Freelance Journalist of the Year and a Melbourne Press Club Quill Award winner. She writes extensively on banking and cash, and her research was the trigger for the Senate Inquiry into regional bank closures in 2023. This article was originally published in The Regional and has been republished with permission.