Reach PLC (LSE:RCH), owner of newspapers Daily Mirror and Daily Express, has started to use AI robots to write news articles, it said today.
The publisher, which also owns a plethora of smaller local papers admitted that an artificial intelligence chatbot wrote stories for its local news site ‘In Your Area’.
“There are three AI-written articles about Newport for In Your Area,” chief executive officer Jim Mullen told The Standard.
“One of them was ‘Seven Things to do in Newport’: that was written by a bot.”
Does ChatGPT have workers worried? No, we'll just get smarter, say staff
The process of using AI for articles still requires human input, with journalists providing the content and making the final decision to run it, Mullen added.
Staff would still be required to focus on the important breaking news, whilst AI can focus on “content that our readers are interested in”, the Reach boss stated.
Other companies have already made use of such technology, Bloomberg uses AI to produce a large percentage of its news content whilst the Associated Press has bot-written articles dating back as early as 2014.
Reach also announced plans to take on the US market, stating it hopes on hiring 100 American employees over the year and claiming it has a ‘playbook’ for reaching new areas.
Around 200 UK workers were laid off at the start of 2023.
The British company announced plans to streamline supply chains, simplify central support functions and avoid editorial duplication after it a difficult 2022 which saw profits and revenues slump.
Since posting full-year results this morning Reach shares have slumped 11% to 80.7p after opening at 87p.