The growing use of artificial intelligence across American business and culture comes at a particularly challenging moment for the media industry. Overall, trust in news organizations (especially at the national level) is scraping new lows, while financial pressures are driving the demand for operating efficiencies to new highs.
AI – and particularly generative AI (GAI), a type of machine learning that creates original content like text, images, code, or audio – poses perils on both scores. If local news organizations like NHPR want to retain their relatively higher level of trust, we will need to move carefully through the thicket of issues that GAI brings to the forefront.
Fundamentally, our aim is to always create journalism, programs, and communications that create more value - for you and for NHPR’s future – than a machine or agent or GAI can on its own. The voices you hear on NHPR and in our podcasts are and will be human voices; the stories you read at NHPR.org are and will be reported, written and edited by humans.
Yet AI offers opportunities for news organizations, as well. That’s why a team here has spent more than a year deepening NHPR’s understanding of AI’s rapidly changing landscape and developing guidelines for whether and how we’ll deploy these emerging tools in our work. In the process, we’ve affirmed a set of values and principles that we’re sharing now with you – the people who rely on NHPR for trustworthy news and information, an honest marketplace of ideas, a source of entertainment, and a healthy environment for sponsorship – because we’ve arrived at them in the spirit of public service:
Accuracy and human verification AI will not replace human judgment or editorial decision making. When GAI tools are used – whether internally or to create materials for public consumption – the results require human review. Everything we publish will live up to our standards of verification. In all our work, it is increasingly important to be explicit about how we know facts are facts.
Transparency, both internal and external. When we use AI tools that further our journalism and mission, we will document and describe the tools and mechanisms with specificity.
Audience service The decision to use AI, in any capacity, will be guided by what will be useful to our audience as we serve you.
Privacy and security Our relationship with our community of listeners, readers, viewers, and supporters is rooted in trust and respect. We will do our utmost to protect our audience’s data in accordance with NHPR’s privacy policies, which forbid entering sensitive or identifying information about users, sources, or our own staff into any GAI tools.
Exploration With the four previous principles as our foundation, we will embrace exploration and experimentation. We will invest in training, so every staff member is knowledgeable about GAI tools. NHPR will continue to evaluate opportunities to leverage AI to increase public access to NHPR content and products, in line with public media’s objective of providing universal access.
Our AI task force – which includes people from across the organization, including reporters, editors, and representatives of the business and fundraising teams – has drafted a more comprehensive AI policy for internal use that will be updated as needed, to reflect the advancing challenges and opportunities posed by AI technology.
I welcome your feedback on the principles I’ve outlined here. You can reach me anytime at president@nhpr.org.
