Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in the Newsroom

What audiences see and hear from WGLT has always been, and always will be, the product of human beings. But WGLT also does not shy away from creative uses of new technology that can help us produce better journalism without compromising the integrity of that work.

If used thoughtfully, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is a tool that can help us fulfill our mission as journalists, become more efficient in our work, and help free staff up to do things that are more creative and critical to advancing our journalism:

• Make WGLT’s journalism more accessible through captions, transcripts, and more.
• Spend less time transcribing audio interviews, and more time doing interviews.
• Speed up audio editing so we can cover more stories in more places.

Guiding principals

All information generated by AI requires human verification. Whatever the tool or use case, the model is Human > Robot > Human. We take responsibility for all content generated or informed by AI tools.

WGLT will be transparent about how it broadly uses A.I. across the Newsroom through this policy posted on our website. When we use generative A.I. in a significant way in our journalism, we will document and describe to our audience the tools with specificity in a way that discloses and educates. This may be a short tagline, a caption or credit, or for something more substantial, like an editor’s note. When appropriate, we will include the prompts that are fed into the model to generate the material.

Because of our ties to Illinois State University and Bradley University, WGLT prioritizes the learning experience and will avoid using A.I. only to save time or to avoid teaching someone how to do a task properly themselves.

What we can do

Here are acceptable uses of A.I. in the WGLT Newsroom. Any output from a Generative A.I. tool should be treated as unvetted source material. This means our journalists will fact-check and verify everything AI assists with to verify for accuracy and make sure it contains the appropriate context and fairness we require with all of our news content.

Newsgathering

• Story research during the reporting process.
• Suggesting questions for interviews.
• Analysis of video from public meetings for quick summarization.
• Monitoring of webpages where public information or documents are posted.
• Transcribing audio from interviews.
• Translating text into different languages.

Content production

• Basic photo editing. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, blurred, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping photos to omit extraneous outer portions).
• Generating alt text to improve accessibility of photos and graphics.
• Basic audio quality cleanup, such as removing distracting room noise/hiss and improving the intelligibility of a cell phone interview.
• Generating transcripts and captions to improve podcast and video accessibility.
• Editing human-written copy used for promotional/marketing purposes only.

What we will NOT do

Here are examples of what WGLT’s staff will NOT do with A.I.:

• We will not use A.I. to write or edit (beyond spellcheck/grammar) any newsroom copy.
• We will not use A.I. to produce new audio.
• We will not use A.I. to create new photo or video content.
• We will not use A.I.-produced material without vetting it like any other source.

Do you have questions about our A.I. policy? Contact us at wglt@ilstu.edu.

WGLT is an NPR member-station. You can also read NPR’s policy on Generative A.I., part of the NPR Ethics Handbook.