By Paisley Porter*
Artificial intelligence is on the rise, and newsrooms around the world are grappling with feelings of apprehension at the risk of compromising their journalistic integrity. However, Google’s AI tools are evoking curiosity among many journalists, leaving them to wonder if AI can enhance journalists’ work instead of replacing it, and if so, how?
“Who used Google Search today?” Iain Christie asked a room of journalists attending a lunchtime workshop at the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ). The workshop was led by Christie, a trainer at Google News Initiative, a team that collaborates with journalists to help global newsrooms flourish.
“While the shift to AI may feel kind of sudden to some, we've been applying it to Google Products for quite some time,” Christie said. “In fact, AI is already integral to a lot of the products you use, probably every single day.”
Google has welcomed artificial intelligence with open arms, most notably through Google Lens, Google Maps and Gmail. Google’s AI tools don’t end there, Google also hosts AI Overviews, Gemini, Fact Check Explorer, NotebookLM, Pinpoint and News Consumer Insights.
“Hopefully, in the course of today's session, I'll show you how those Google AI tools can make your job as journalists easier,” Christie said.
Christie opened the workshop with a condensed history of Google’s involvement with AI. Google began training neural networks, a core component of AI learning designed to mimic the human brain structure and function, with data in 2012.
Google’s AI follows 3 simple principles: bold innovation; responsible development and deployment; collaborative progress, together.
“We can use generative AI to unlock entirely new questions that search can answer,’ Christie said. “Now think of how transformative Google Search was when it launched, then think of how transformative generative AI can be when applied to Google Search.”
With over 8.5 billion Google searches a day or 99,000 searches per second, there is a huge opportunity to use AI to aid in each and every Google search, he said. When doing a simple Google search, users may have noticed a new feature at the top of the results, AI Overviews.
Certain searches will offer an AI Overview that breaks down the topic into easily digestible summaries, with links to sources where the user can learn more.
“With AI Overviews, people actually use search more. They are more satisfied with the results they get, and they are visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions,” Christi said.
Christie then introduced the five tools that he would be going over, beginning with Google’s Gemini, a generative AI chatbot and a “huge deal” at Google due in part to the fact that it powers the other four tools he discussed during the workshop.
“This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we have ever undertaken as a company,” Christie said. “It's a big ol’ deal, folks.”
Featured across Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, as well as through Gmail’s smart reply, Gemini aims to help boost productivity in the newsroom by helping users communicate more effectively and visualize more efficiently, he said.
“The Gemini ecosystem represents Google's most capable AI,’ Christie said.
Fact Check Explorer provides insights into fact-checking topics, people and images. Users can search for previously checked claims and whether they are true or false.
“Researchers at Google and several other fact-checking organizations reviewed over 130,000 fact checks,” Christie said.
But who are the fact-checkers? It's a network of organizations around the world working to explain why misinformation is false, he said. While AI will summarize the results of a fact checking search, it's the work of numerous journalists that helps decipher veracity.
NoteBookLM is an AI research and writing tool helping journalists find and summarize insights faster.
“It's like a personalized AI research assistant that helps you understand the information that matters most to you,” Christie said.
Pinpoint is a research tool designed to help journalists explore, organize and analyze large collections of documents, images and more, using AI search technologies – or in Christie's words – “find a needle in a haystack.”
“It's for investigative journalists, it's for the deep dive. It's for really getting your hands dirty in a particular subject,” Christie said.
On the second day of ISOJ, Christie took a deeper dive into NotebookLM and Pinpoint and how these particular research tools might help journalists in their work.
*Paisley Porter is a third-year Journalism and Communication & Leadership student at UT Austin. She is currently an intern at KXAN and has previously done coverage for TSTV and ISOJ.