While Artificial intelligence Invading more and more aspects of daily life, experts are raising concerns about the potential impact on personal and social life, from job loss to the spread of misinformation. Large groups mass media they are concerned that their publications are being used as a source and basis for artificial intelligence to generate news. In today’s letter, Financial Times director Rula Calaf speaks about media attitudes towards new technologies.

With over 130 years of history, the Financial Times has upheld the highest standards of journalism. For me, as the editor of this newspaper, nothing is more important than readers’ trust in our quality journalism. Quality means, above all, precision. It also means fairness and transparency.

That’s why today I’m sharing my thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom.

Productive artificial intelligence is the most important new technology since the Internet. As its applications and implications evolve at breakneck speed, they keep popping up. AI models learn from vast amounts of published data, including books, publications, Wikipedia, and social media sites, to predict the most likely (i.e. next) word in a sentence.

This innovation is an increasingly important area for us, and I am determined to make FT an invaluable source of AI information and analysis in the coming years. But it also has obvious and potentially far-reaching implications for journalists and editors in how we approach our daily work, analyzing and discovering stories. This can increase productivity and free up journalists’ and editors’ time so they can focus on creating and reporting original content.

However, the artificial intelligence models on the market today seem to be very accurate and plausible, in fact they are predictive machines as they learn from the past. They can fabricate facts – these are what are called “illusions” – and invent references, footnotes and references. If manipulated by AI models, they can create completely false images and articles. They also reproduce historical prejudices.

I believe our mission to create high quality journalism is even more important in this age of rapid technological innovation. At a time when disinformation can be produced and spread quickly and trust in the media is declining, we at the FT have a great responsibility to be transparent, report the facts and seek the truth. This is why FT reports in the new age of AI will continue to be produced and written by people who are the best in their field and who are committed to reporting and analyzing the world as it is, with accuracy and fairness.

FT is also a pioneer in digital journalism, and our colleagues will use AI to provide a service to readers and keep our innovative approach alive. The newsroom must also remain the center of innovation. It is important and necessary for the FT to have a news team that can responsibly experiment with AI tools to assist journalists with tasks, analysis and translation of text and images. We will not publish photorealistic images generated by artificial intelligence, but we will explore the use of advanced visual technologies (infographics, charts, photos), and when we do, we will inform our readers about it.

We will be transparent both within the FT and with our readers. All newsroom experiments will be logged internally, including, where possible, the use of third party vendors that may use this tool. Training our journalists to use creative AI for storytelling will be conducted through a series of workshops.

Each technology opens up exciting new frontiers that need to be explored responsibly. But as recent history has shown, enthusiasm must be accompanied by caution about the risk of misinformation and distortion of the truth. The FT will remain committed to its core mission and keep its readers informed as generative AI itself and our understanding of it evolves.”