Can AI Tools Meet Journalistic Standards?

Tech companies promise that AI tools can do more with less—so perhaps they can help news outlets survive declining subscription sales and evaporating advertising revenue. Certainly, AI is being used effectively by some journalists to crunch numbers at lightning speed and make sense of vast databases. That’s a big benefit, one that has contributed to prizewinning work in the public interest. 

But more than two years after the public release of large language models (LLMs), the promise that the media industry might benefit from AI seems unlikely to bear out, or at least not fully.