The Bay Agenda: AI and Journalism

Nowadays, there is a good chance you have heard - or been in conversations about- all the different ways that artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of work. And it’s real.U.S. hospitals have doubled their adoption of AI in two years.Finance companies now execute 70% of equity trades through AI algorithms. And Amazon deployed over 1 million warehouse robots that have boosted productivity per worker by more than 20 times.But journalism is still figuring out what it means. In a recent survey of over 70 countries, nearly 80% of newsrooms had no formal AI policy. KALW is no exception, we are still having very active discussions about the ways AI can or cannot fit into our set of values. To better understand this rapidly changing tool, our live events team put together a panel of people working in different media organizations facing the same question. The panelists were, Katherine Ann Rowlands, who leads Bay City News Foundation, /Ernesto Aguilar of KQED, who oversees content innovation /and Griffin Gaffney, CEO and co-founder of The San Francisco Standard. They were in conversation with KALW’s Executive Producer Ben Trefny.In this excerpt, we begin by hearing Gaffney explaining how The Standard is addressing AI in their newsroom.