Microsoft reveals partnerships with news media companies to give them generative AI access

One of the biggest fears among people who have problems with the rise of generative AI models is that they could be used to create realistic but false news articles, images, and even videos that could sway public opinions on subjects and elections. Today, Microsoft announced it will offer generative AI services to several news organizations and Journalism schools to make these kinds of tools safer and more trustworthy to use.

In Microsoft's blog post, the company states that these new partnerships will not only offer research and assistance to journalists and newsrooms, but will also help to "identify ways AI can help create efficient business practices and help build sustainable newsrooms for generations to come."

The most high profile of these partnerships will be between Microsoft and the news website Semafor. The site will have a new section called Semafor Signals. which will be a breaking news feed with a number of stories posted each day. Real journalists will write the stories, but they will use AI tools from Microsoft and OpenAI to assist them in researching these articles before they are written.

Semafor stated:

When tapping into these AI research tools, our editors then evaluate and verify sources, compose summaries, and clearly cite and link readers to the original information.

Some of the other partnerships that were revealed by Microsoft today include one from The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University in New York. It will invite journalists to a three-month program to show them how to use generative AI in their work.

The Online News Association and The GroundTruth Project will also use AI services from Microsoft. Finally, a startup company called Nota, which has created several AI journalism tools, will see them used in over 100 newsrooms, with support from Microsoft. The blog post states:

Nota will soon release a new tool called PROOF, an assistive recommendation widget that will give real-time tips to journalists and editors about how to better reach audiences with their content through readability, SEO analysis, link integrity, and more.

These new AI journalism partnerships were announced just a few weeks after The New York Times filed a lawsuit against both Microsoft and OpenAI. The news organization claimed both companies illegally accessed millions of NY Times articles to train their AI models and in so doing violated their copyrights.