Five of this year’s Pulitzer finalists are AI-powered | Nieman Journalism Lab
▻https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/five-of-this-years-pulitzer-finalists-are-ai-powered
Two of journalism’s most prestigious prizes — the Pulitzers and the Polk awards — on how they’re thinking about entrants using generative AI.
By Alex Perry March 11, 2024, 10:31 a.m.
Five of the 45 finalists in this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism disclosed using AI in the process of researching, reporting, or telling their submissions, according to Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller.
It’s the first time the awards, which received around 1,200 submissions this year, required entrants to disclose AI usage. The Pulitzer Board only added this requirement to the journalism category. (The list of finalists is not yet public. It will be announced, along with the winners, on May 8, 2024.)
Miller, who sits on the 18-person Pulitzer board, said the board started discussing AI policies early last year because of the rising popularity of generative AI and machine learning.
“AI tools at the time had an ‘oh no, the devil is coming’ reputation,” she said, adding that the board was interested in learning about AI’s capabilities as well as its dangers.
Last July — the same month OpenAI struck a deal with the Associated Press and a $5 million partnership with the American Journalism Project — a Columbia Journalism School professor was giving the Pulitzer Board a crash course in AI with the help of a few other industry experts.
Mark Hansen, who is also the director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, wanted to provide the board with a broad base of AI usage in newsrooms from interrogating large datasets to writing code for web-scraping large language models.
He and AI experts from The Marshall Project, Harvard Innovation Labs, and Center for Cooperative Media created informational videos about the basics of large language models and newsroom use cases. Hansen also moderated a Q&A panel featuring AI experts from Bloomberg, The Markup, McClatchy, and Google.
Miller said the board’s approach from the beginning was always exploratory. They never considered restricting AI usage because they felt doing so would discourage newsrooms from engaging with innovative technology.
“I see it as an opportunity to sample the creativity that journalists are bringing to generative AI, even in these early days,” said Hansen, who didn’t weigh in directly on the new awards guideline.
While the group focused on generative AI’s applications, they spent substantial time on relevant copyright law, data privacy, and bias in machine learning models. One of the experts Hansen invited was Carrie J. Cai, a staff research scientist in Google’s Responsible AI division who specializes in human-computer interaction.