After announcing a partnership with OpenAI last month, the Associated Press has issued guidelines for using generative AI in news reporting, urging caution in using artificial intelligence. The news agency has also added a new chapter in its widely used AP Stylebook pertaining to coverage of AI, a story that “goes far beyond business and technology” and is “also about politics, entertainment, education, sports, human rights, the economy, equality and inequality, international law, and many other issues,” according to AP, which says stories about AI should “show how these tools are affecting many areas of our lives.”

“AP is one of a handful of news organizations that have begun to set rules on how to integrate fast-developing tech tools like ChatGPT into their work,” the Associated Press wrote on AP News.

Among the standards shared in an AP blog post is the directive that “any output from a generative AI tool should be treated as unvetted source material.” In other words, applying  strenuous independent validation.

The internal AP guidelines, which were not publicly released, “stress the importance of human editing, warn about the myriad pitfalls of generative AI: its tendency to ‘hallucinate’ and produce misinformation, the ease at which bad actors can produce disinformation and privacy issues concerning what users put into ChatGPT,” writes Poynter in an article about the guidelines.

Vanity Fair writes that The New York Times recently sent newsroom staff and opinion writers an email instructing: “Do not use generative AI tools in any aspect of our journalism without getting approval, until we further explore the opportunities and the risks.”

The NYT memo contained an advisory that even the coverage of AI is rife with pitfalls, stating “the public terms of use for almost all of these tools also carry significant legal risks for protecting our intellectual property and other rights,” according to Vanity Fair.

Harvard’s Nieman Lab writes “one new AP Stylebook entry cautions journalists to avoid ‘language that attributes human characteristics to these systems,’” and also emphasizes that generative AI is “not a replacement of journalists in any way.”

In a separate article, the Nieman Lab drew on 21 international news sources to compile a list of best practices for drafting AI guidelines for the newsroom.