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News Corp's Herald Sun is using AI to generate full local news articles from council meeting minutes, labelled as AI-assisted and edited by a human, as the media union warns the technology cannot replace journalism jobs.
News Corp's Herald Sun has outsourced major parts of its local coverage to artificial intelligence, expanding its use of the technology from traffic and weather reports to full news stories.
The publisher's community division in Victoria, known as Herald Sun Leader, is producing articles that draw on recent council meeting minutes from several Melbourne metropolitan and regional areas, including Moonee Valley and Monash City Council. Each article carries a note at the end stating it was produced using AI and then checked by a human editor before publication. The stories also feature AI-generated imagery.
The articles describe themselves as part of a News Corp ambition to publish more regional and community stories than ever before. News Corp states the articles were created with AI assistance and then edited and approved by an editor.
This week, the masthead ran articles under headlines including Mount Waverley car park to lose 48 spaces for expanded outdoor dining, Resident slams Moonee Valley Council over flood claim legal battle spending, and Moonee Ponds residents demand answers on racecourse dust and shaking homes. Some of the AI-produced articles suggest the content was produced by entering the entire published minutes from council meetings into an AI model to generate a summary or news reproduction.
A Herald Sun spokeswoman said the masthead was exploring ways to cover under-serviced regional and community areas, including by using AI. Journalist roles would not be affected and staff were positive about the plans, she said. No roles will be reduced because of this project or in the event that it is expanded, as this is being conducted in addition to a significant investment in journalists who will be based in regional Victoria, she said.
Any story created with the assistance of verified AI is edited and approved for publication by an editor, and it is clearly and transparently identified and labelled as such, she said. News Corp shuttered the 20 print titles under the Leader group banner in 2020 and has made a number of journalists in its local news division redundant in the years since. It continues to publish content online under the digital banners of some of those titles.
The company has been vocal in lobbying the federal government for legislation requiring AI firms to compensate news outlets for the use of their content to train their language models and reproduce information. News Corp signed a global deal with ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, and executives said the arrangement is actually more than that. This year, it also signed a content licensing deal with Facebook-owner Meta worth $US50 million ($70 million) per year.
Last year, News Corp and chief executive Robert Miller announced the company had begun using AI to produce weather and traffic reports, court listings and articles detailing where to find cheap fuel. Miller said at the time that 55 per cent of subscriptions to news outlets were driven by local mastheads and stories.
During a National Press Club appearance two years ago, Miller said media companies should start using AI as a tool to produce better work, but insisted we are not going to see journalists replaced by AI. Asked about a story covering one recent Moonee Valley council meeting, Mayor Rose Iser, who is mentioned in the story, dismissed the need for AI-generated journalism weeks after meetings took place. We publish a live recording and meeting minutes pretty quickly.
People can get all the information from the council's website and it is free, accessible and accurate, Iser said. Reduced funding for local and regional news outlets has created news deserts across Australia, often leaving regional areas without any local news coverage aside from regional ABC bureaus. Nine, the owner of this masthead, sold 160 regional titles to Australian Community Media in 2019, many of which have since been shuttered or made digital-only.
A spokesperson for the media union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said AI may help with efficiencies, but it cannot replace the reporting, fact-checking and community knowledge that underpin trusted journalism. The industry has already endured significant newsroom losses, particularly in local and regional media, and there is a real risk that AI is used to replace journalism jobs rather than support journalists, the spokesperson said. Human journalists tell human stories.
Communities deserve reporters who know their local area, can build sources, ask difficult questions and hold power to account, the spokesperson said.
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theage:News Corp starts generating local news stories with AI ‘assistance’ 
brisbanetimes:News Corp starts generating local news stories with AI ‘assistance’This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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