When considering these tools, it's important to draw out some of the broader impacts that AI is having on the field. For a very long time, writing a good story, whether it was about corporate business practices or crime, demanded an intuitive sense of what was interesting or inspiring a network of sources to cultivate and mobilize on short notice, and a meticulous focus on the details. Now, writers can use new technologies to help them speed up their reporting, automate rote tasks, and analyze data that, in the past, might have taken hours or days to unearth12. The reality is that machines in journalism aren't meant to replace human writers, they're meant to complement them. Given the right tools, journalists can do a lot more with a lot less: they can keep producing deep, probing work while casting an ever-wider net34.

Writers doing research can benefit enormously from tools like OpenAI's GPT models because they can generate summaries, mine information from a variety of sources, and even suggest angles for a story. If you're researching political trends, economic data, or the latest tech "breakthrough", an AI-generated model could save you hours of research time12. For instance, you create a prompt such as 'climate change policy in Europe', and it gives you a structured summary: the latest developments, how politicians have responded, the main players, and so on. Using AI for this kind of basic research frees journalists from having to wade through the vast amounts of available information, to focus on the next step, which includes digging deeper, interviewing people, and turning the information into a story34.

Even the most talented of journalists can fall prey to writer's block, or could always do with extra support for polishing their prose. AI-driven writing aids are increasingly essential for many writers to help with issues such as style, rhythm, and clarity.1 From Jasper, which helps writers come up with headlines and organize articles, to ChatGPT, which can draft an article from a brief given to it, there are several AI services that can ease the burden placed on writers at different points of the writerly process.2 Say you have an editorial deadline, and you need to write an intro for a story. Tell the AI the key points of the story, and it can quickly generate a few introductory paragraphs for you to choose from, or adapt. At the highest levels, this automated production-line process not only makes the work quicker, it also can take you to places you might not have found on your own – to points that, for example, you would not have thought of mentioning.3

These rules apply to journalism too. We storytellers need pictures, video, and graphics to reach an audience. Artificial intelligence is helping here too. DALL-E is a bit like Microsoft PowerPoint for AI images. You input a text prompt, and out comes an image to help illustrate your story.1 As a journalist who has worked in countries with restricted access to traditional photography resources, or when trying to come up with a different visual to clarify a concept that would otherwise go untapped, this is a highly useful tool. Canva AI also provides this kind of service, offering templates and AI-driven suggestions to help you create infographics, social media graphics, and other visual assets, quickly and easily. In the world of writing, such tools level the playing field for journalists and writers with no design training, making it simpler to incorporate multimedia into their work.