Alaska Press Club Conference -- Day One, Sage Smiley on AI

 The Press Club Conference begins.  This is the first time I remember a conference when it was snowy.  

Let's see how best I can do this.  

These are notes from the first panel I went to on how journalists can use AI ethically, by Sage Smiley.  

I have consciously resisted AI - getting old?, doing my own thing?  resistance to change?  just suspicious? - probably all of those.  So this was a good chance to hear from someone who has had a Fellowship to learn about AI.  

AI is a tool.  AI can't be ethical or unethical.  It's the users of AI, the people who use it, who will use it ethically or unethically.  And given that the majority party in Congress and the occupant of the White House have shown themselves to be ethically challenged, I still have serious concerns here.  

Perhaps I could say this panel was about how journalists can be more ethical if they want to be ethical and use AI.  And that's what the title of this presentation says:  "Ethicallt Using AI as a Journalist"

A questioner at the end said he's strongly opposed to AI, and the response was that this is how journalists can use it, and if they don't use it, they won't understand it.  If we are going to write about AI, we have to know what it is and how it works."

There was a lively and helpful discussion.  

The rest are my raw notes as I try to give a sense of what's happening here in close to real time, while being able to get on to the next panel.  Treat these just as my notes as I took them during the session to give you an idea of what was covered.  

Sage Smiley,  AI  - How to ethically harness the robots

I've been skeptical, environmentally and other ways.  Applied for Fellowship to find out more

What do you know? 

Use Quad, ??? transcribing interviews,  ChatGPT - makes things up.  

Places we can use AI, but doesn't replace humans.  Can do things we can't but it is infallible. 

Paywalls, academic journals, AI legally can't be legally looking at that.  People can go beyond that.  

Ethics, Tools, Examples

Proprietary AIs - BBC, Financial Times - Building the AI Playground

Ethics

NPR Ethics as example - 

Human -  Thoughtful - Benefits

Going Deeper - accuracy, completeness, impartiality

-Transparency - Protection  - Excellence

If AI is big, give credit to AI like you would attribute another writer.

Duty to people - documents public, but not easily acceptable, copyrights

Use AI to create headlines?   as long as not blindly using,  

Privacy - AI mining - do you put confidential info into AI.  

Partnership on AI 10 Step Guide to responsible adoption of AI tools in newsrooms

Poynter Ethics 

TOOLS

Many, querying, documenting

Ground level thoughts - changing all the time, quality improving maybe, important to check AI (some fabricate things) 

Tiiks tea are bit cage''

Perplexity,  Notebook LM (google) audio and video, Claude Gemini, Adobe Podcast, Pinpoint

Coding - creating code, better than conversational AI

Quad - good at creating code to scrape or analyze data, and stronger privacy 

Pinpoint also google, journalists

Enviornmental Impact

Other uses around the world

• APA alt text for infographics
• BBC verify deepfake detector
• AI for scraping large interviews OR hours of testimony
• El Vocero Weather Alerts  =Puerto Rico and AP

Tools for creating NAPKIN.AI  for infographics

Digital Democracy.org - public hearings, $ donated to pols, 

Columns - data

GITHUB - creating code