Last month I wrote about my decision to use an AI diary as part of assessment for a module I teach on the journalism degrees at Birmingham City University. The results are in — and they are revealing.
What if we just asked students to keep a record of all their interactions with AI? That was the thinking behind the AI diary, a form of assessment that I introduced this year for two key reasons: to increase transparency about the use of AI, and to increase critical thinking.
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What exactly is the environmental impact of using generative AI? It’s not an easy question to answer, as the MIT Technology Review’s James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart found when they set out to find some answers.
“The common understanding of AI’s energy consumption,” they write, “is full of holes.”
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Datenjournalistische Projekte lassen sich in einzelne Schritte aufteilen – jeder einzelne Schritt bringt eigene Herausforderungen. Um dir zu helfen, habe ich die “Umgekehrte Pyramide des Datenjournalismus” entwickelt. Sie zeigt, wie du aus einer Idee eine fokussierte Datengeschichte machst. Ich erkläre dir Schritt für Schritt, worauf du achten solltest, und gebe dir Tipps, wie du typische Stolpersteine vermeiden kannst.
(Auch auf Englisch, Spanisch, Portugiesisch, Finnisch, Russisch and Ukrainisch verfügbar.)
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Last month the BBC’s Shared Data Unit held its annual Data and Investigative Journalism UK conference at the home of my MA in Data Journalism, Birmingham City University. Here are some of the highlights…
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As universities adapt to a post-ChatGPT era, many journalism assessments have tried to address the widespread use of AI by asking students to declare and reflect on their use of the technology in some form of critical reflection, evaluation or report accompanying their work. But having been there and done that, I didn’t think it worked.
So this year — my third time round teaching generative AI to journalism students — I made a big change: instead of asking students to reflect on their use of AI in a critical evaluation alongside a portfolio of journalism work, I ditched the evaluation entirely.
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For the last two years I have been standing in front of classes and conferences saying the words “AI is biased” — but a couple months ago, I stopped.
As journalists, we are trained to be careful with language — and “AI is biased” is a sloppy piece of writing. It is a thoughtless cliche, often used without really thinking what it means, or how it might mislead.
Because yes, AI is “biased” — but it’s not biased in the way most people might understand that word.
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Earlier this month I was interviewed for a feature about data journalism in the Argentina newspaper La Nacion. Here are the full questions and answers, in English, published as part of the FAQ series.
Continue readingA new AI function is being added to Google Sheets that could make most other functions redundant. But is it any good? And what can it be used for? Here’s what I’ve learned in the first week…
AI has been built into Google Sheets for some time now in the Clippy-like form of Gemini in Sheets. But Google Sheets’s AI function is different.
Available to a limited number of users for now, it allows you to incorporate AI prompts directly into a formula rather than having to rely on Gemini to suggest a formula using existing functions.
At the most basic level that means the AI function can be used instead of functions like SUM, AVERAGE or COUNT by simply including a prompt like “Add the numbers in these cells” (or “calculate an average for” or “count”). But more interesting applications come in areas such as classification, translation, analysis and extraction, especially where a task requires a little more ‘intelligence’ than a more literally-minded function can offer.
I put the AI function through its paces with a series of classification challenges to see how it performed. Here’s what happened — and some ways in which the risks of generative AI need to be identified and addressed.
In many countries public data is limited, and access to data is either restricted, or information provided by the authorities is not credible. So how do you obtain data for a story? Here are some techniques used by reporters around the world.
Continue readingTools like ChatGPT might seem to speak your language, but they actually speak a language of probability and educated guesswork. You can make yourself better understood — and get more professional results — with a few simple prompting techniques. Here are the key ones to add to your toolkit. (also in Portuguese)
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