Like every workplace, Civil Beat is facing some tough decisions related to artificial intelligence. And, similar to most, our organization’s bond of trust with our “customers” – which in our case means all of you, our readers and supporters – depends on us making the right ones.

Today we have posted our first AI policy, one that has grown out of many months of reviewing which technology tools are available and which might be helpful, and determining which should remain off limits to a newsroom that values accuracy and audience trust above all else. It’s not long if you want to take a look— and that is by design: Things are changing quickly and we want to have the flexibility to change with them.

As we say in our new policy, we don’t want to outlaw all uses since AI offers an opportunity to speed up and improve some pretty menial tasks, such as scraping public websites, evaluating which stories readers find most intriguing, and transcribing audio and video. In fact, those are the uses that we intend to continue to lean into, all with humans checking behind the machines.

In truth, anyone who has been watching closely also knows that AI has been in the background of Google searches and calculations within large datasets for years. Today, though, we’re faced with an array of new tools, such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, all promising to be faster and smarter than our human brains.

I started my newspaper career in junior high school on a typewriter, so word processing and laptop computers were life-changing — and not just because they saved my aching fingers. So was the World Wide Web when it crash-landed into my career years later — bringing with it an avalanche of information and the ability to increase the chances my stories would reach those who stood to benefit most from them.

Artificial intelligence could turn out to be just as revolutionary for the media.

Yet we know that the word “intelligence” can be an overstatement and we’ve seen other newsrooms stumble in attempts to use AI. Hallucinations, bias, errors, chasms of — oops! — missed facts. Their mistakes are a lesson for us all. 

For now, Civil Beat’s only public-facing use of artificial intelligence will remain Digital Democracy, a state legislative platform that uses AI to gather public testimony, campaign donations, lawmakers’ votes and more into an interactive, intuitive database. One feature allows you to search for a word or phrase in testimony, then link immediately to the spot in the video where the person said those words. As we’ve hosted trainings on the platform, many have told us that alone saves them time and frustration.

We’ll continue to monitor this new technology as it evolves, and our usage — and policy — no doubt will evolve, too. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts and, as always, we’ll keep you at the center of our decisions and we’ll keep you informed.