Consultants Are Cashing in on the AI Boom
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, March 10th. I'm Isabelle Bousquet for The Wall Street Journal. Today, we're looking at two industries that seemed ripe for AI disruption, or maybe even death. But so far, we're seeing the opposite. First, AI might be the savior local news has been waiting for. Across the country, local reporters are using the tech to cover more stories more deeply, although it's not without risks. Next up, the consulting industry is also getting a boost from AI giants. We're diving into how a flurry of deals between AI labs and large consultancies are mutually beneficial, at least for now. But first, for years, AI has felt like a threat to journalism, with its promise to create loads of cheap content online without any human intervention.
But it turns out the technology has actually been a boon for local news. Reporters in underfunded and understaffed newsrooms are now using AI to monitor police scanners in town meetings, saving them hours that they say they can now spend on deeper investigative reporting. Across the industry, AI is writing the first drafts of an article, which a human then edits. Wall Street Journal media reporter Alexandra Bruel joins us to talk about how it's all working and what could go wrong. Alex, from your perspective, how much of a game changer is this for these local reporters and these local outlets?
It depends on the outlet and it depends on the reporter. I've talked to a number of people who say that this is huge. This enables them to do better coverage, to write about communities that have long gone uncovered, to potentially do more investigative reporting and cover stories and topics that they've been wanting to dig into. I talked to one reporter and At Axios, who covers Des Moines and is looking forward to the time that it's saving her so that she can go out and do more investigative work on water quality issues in the state. There's a lot of excitement around that time saving and the ability to be able to do some real reporting and to more quickly and efficiently file FOIA requests for public records.
And we are starting to see some actual results. One example I thought was very interesting is the NewsQuest example. NewsQuest is owned by USA Today, the biggest local news business in the country. They said in January they used AI to draft a quarter of the 60,000 stories they put out in January. And that is the use of AI to do the first draft of these stories, which are then edited and reviewed by actual human editors. But they say that this is going to lead to the potential hiring this year of more reporters.
When drafts of stories are being written by AI, there is a lot that can go wrong. So what are some of the risks here or what kinds of fumbles have we seen so far, if any?
Yeah, there's certainly a risk and over-reliance on AI. We saw this in the early days of experimenting with AI in newsrooms. We saw certain publishers using vendors for the creation and curation of content. that ended up being wrong or putting errors into stories.
How is AI becoming a savior for local news?
So there's a fear there in over-relying on AI to do the drafting of stories, to taking jobs. There's also a fear that some of the time saved could be used for more AI slop or just, hey, reporter, you now have... 10% more time in your day, go generate more quick stories that aren't necessarily meaningful. So there's a fear that this will just turn into a content engine, you know, in some places, as opposed to a means to good journalism.
You wrote about at least one AI company that has started creating its own local news sites. Curious about what's going on there.
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