Editor’s note: we are republishing a version of the note that previously appeared in The Fix Media’s weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get everything you need to know about the European media market every Monday, along with monthly special reports.

A key rule in The Fix’s own guide to using ChatGPT is never to use it for directly generating text that would be published in our articles or other editorial products.

The main reason is simple – generative AI tools available today are bad at generating interesting, engaging, factually correct text from scratch. (There’s still a lot of supplementary tasks ChatGPT helps us with, such as brainstorming ideas or getting feedback to the text a human wrote).

That said, not all text on the internet has to be interesting and engaging. Sometimes a good bullshit generator is exactly what you need – whether to master a flood of emails or to generate a slate of job descriptions. 

A few weeks ago Press Gazette spoke with Mediahuis’ data and insights director Trui Lanckriet about how the company uses generative AI. The title refers to AI use in the newsroom, but one of the most interesting insights from the interview is actually the opposite. We spend too much time thinking about how AI will shape newsrooms and overlook how it can already be used in other departments within news organisations, such as marketing, legal, or HR.

Of course, it’s interesting to speculate how generative AI will impact journalists’ jobs – and we at The Fix have done our fair share of the speculation. But it might be more practical to focus on what ChatGPT-like tools can do for non-journalists in the news industry.

To that end, if your organisation uses generative AI outside the newsroom and you wouldn’t mind sharing your experience with The Fix, contact us at anton@thefix.media. You’re guaranteed a human-written response (for now).

Source of the cover photo: depositphotos