Major news outlets are now regularly publicizing their stances on the use of Generative AI, or Gen AI, by their journalists. Some, like Associated Press and The Guardian, have outright banned the use of generative AI in the creation of stories and images. Others suggest that generative AI will play a part in writing content.
This is nascent technology and it’s premature to say who is on the right side of this and where generative AI tools will fit in to content creation and journalism. And while Foundry editorial has established publicly that it will continue to produce only high-quality, human-generated content, there’s no doubting that generative AI can be an accelerator for journalism.
Used well, generative AI serves audiences by allowing users curated access to trusted content created by real, expert humans. It allows our audience members to tell us what they need through their interactions with our content. At Foundry this serves our customers because we build deep engagements between users and the content they need, in a trusted environment.
So I am excited to write about Smart Answers: Foundry’s first audience-facing Gen AI app that helps readers of Macworld, PCWorld, Tech Advisor and TechHive find the information they need based only on content created by our world-class journalists.
You can find out more about Smart Answers here.
Smart Answers allows users to access personalized insights generated from only recent, relevant content written by human journalists. For a reader, it is like having a personal editor guiding them with intelligence to the right answer. For the editor, it means every piece of content they create combines with every other article to generate hundreds of insights.
Smart Answers is an investment in providing a better experience for our audience that makes the knowledge and skill of our expert editors even more valuable.
Foundry has a near 60-year history of being innovative and embracing the new, whilst retaining and enhancing core values of reader service, quality content and trust. In our industry a lot of the talk about Generative AI has focused on efficiencies and cost savings driven by AI. Process enhancement is an important part of the AI revolution, and we have for several years been using such tools on downstream tasks such as copy writing, copy editing and machine translation. But Smart Answers is an innovation that benefits our customers by creating deeper engagement with our audience.
We want our expert journalists to spend 100 percent of their time creating unique insights. We believe that human insight and quality, independent editorial have never been more important. We have a mission to serve our audience, and our customers: real people, real data, real results.
Smart Answers is an important early step in our journey with Generative AI that helps us to accelerate the ways we do absolutely that. We will listen to what users want, iterate, and adapt—always in the service of our readers and customers.
