Nine Publishing’s mastheads -The Age,The Sydney Morning Herald,The Australian Financial Review,Brisbane Times and WAtoday- are trusted by our audiences to create journalism that is insightful,independent and of the highest quality.
These core journalistic values will not come at the expense of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. As a general principle,there must always be a human between any AI tool and our audience.
We have developed these guidelines for the secure and ethical use of AI technologies and AI-generated output (e.g. data,images,text) in relation to the creation and publication of content across our newsrooms. This applies to both generative AI (technology that “creates”) and assistive AI (technology that “suggests” or supports the completion of tasks) that offer many opportunities to enhance our journalism.
These guidelines are underpinned by the company’s AI principles,and seek to establish clear and transparent guardrails on AI use that will enable us to protect the accuracy and quality of our journalism and maintain the trust of our readers.
They will be updated from time to time to ensure they are current,accurate and meet the evolving needs of our audiences and mastheads.
Guidelines:
Use by editorial employees
Our employees are encouraged to be curious about AI. Accordingly,journalists and editorial employees are allowed to use AI tools where there is a genuine benefit in doing so. This may include using assistive AI to do initial research,prompt ideas,analyse data or suggest headlines.
AI will not be used to write stories for publication.
Human scrutiny of results
Where AI tools are used for a task,the results must be critically scrutinised,verified and checked by a human before being used in any way towards the creation of content. We use multiple,reputable sources to confirm facts and never rely solely on AI.
Imagery
AI will not be used to generate photo-realistic images or illustrations for publication,except in cases where the AI-generated nature of the image is the point of the story. With editor approval,AI may be used in the creation of certain graphics.
Transparency
In the rare cases where AI-generated material is published (text or imagery),with the approval of the editor,it will be clearly labelled as such for the benefit of readers. The use of assistive AI does not require declaration.
Confidentiality
Private,confidential or sensitive information will not be fed into a third-party AI platform,including into unpublished stories. However,unpublished stories may be fed into internal,closed AI environments to assist with the creation of headlines and write-offs.