Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Teaching journalism students generative AI: why I switched to an “AI diary” this semester

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The Thinker status
Image by Fredrik Rubensson CC BY-SA 2.0

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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Google Sheets has a new AI function — how does it perform on classification tasks?

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A 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…

The AI function avoids the Clippy-like annoyances of Gemini in Sheets

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.

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7 prompt design techniques for generative AI every journalist should know

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Tools 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)

Prompt design techniques for genAI Role prompting One-shot prompting Recursive prompting Retrieval augmented generation Chain of thought Meta prompting Negative prompting
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Data journalism’s AI opportunity: the 3 different types of machine learning & how they have already been used

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I understand that you want me to explain how Ava works (from Ex Machina)

This week I’m rounding off the first semester of classes on the new MA in Data Journalism with a session on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of AI — and an area which holds enormous potential for journalism, both as a tool and as a subject for journalistic scrutiny.

So I thought I would share part of the class here, showing some examples of how the 3 types of machine learning — supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement — have already been used for journalistic purposes, and using those to explain what those are along the way. Continue reading →