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AI advice from journalists who stopped talking and started building

Poynter · Alex Mahadevan · last updated

Five takeaways from a full day of panels at the Hacks/Hackers and Poynter AI and Journalism Day during SXSW

Of the 440 applications Texas Tribune chief product officer Darla Cameron received for an AI engineering role, 90% were junk.

Many appeared to be written using the very tools candidates were supposed to understand. “Here’s a short response that’ll work for this,” one application read — an obvious artifact of copying and pasting from ChatGPT.

The anecdote, shared during the Hacks/Hackers and Poynter AIxJournalism Day at SXSW, captures the strange ways AI is transforming newsrooms. The technology can be genuinely useful when used responsibly, but it’s already producing unintended and often absurd side effects.

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