What we believe
At Being Patient, we believe that publishing content produced by generative AI tools like ChatGPT is plagiarism. We embrace the potential of AI to advance the field of journalism, while remaining steadfast in our commitment to journalistic integrity, credibility, and trustworthiness.
This AI policy serves as our framework for the transparent, ethical, and responsible use of AI technologies within the Being Patient newsroom and organization at large.
At Being Patient, we will never publish articles produced by generative AI.
Our promise to you
We publish articles produced and edited by human journalists, with clear attribution.
- We have a multi-tiered quality control workflow of humans. All of our articles involve at least two journalists, a reporter and an editor who reviews the story thoroughly prior to being published. Writers’ work is reviewed by editors and fact-checkers, who are responsible for verifying the accuracy and reliability of our content before publication.
- All our articles will have a human writer, original reporting, and proper attribution. Our journalists and researchers will always be credited.
The regulated ways in which our newsroom uses AI
AI technologies help us enhance workflow efficiencies within our newsroom. This includes automating repetitive tasks, analyzing data, and identifying relevant trends and insights to inform our reporting. We maintain a running list of vetted AI tools in use by our team. We may leverage AI tools in the following ways:
1. To transcribe interviews, introducing workflow efficiencies so we can share news faster with our readers:
AI-powered speech-to-text conversion — or transcription — tools have been in use for years. If you use a “voice to text” feature to dictate text messages on your cell phone, you are already using this technology, too. In the interest of accessibility, we use a plug-in that converts our text articles to streaming narration, and a separate platform that converts spoken conversations into writing. You’ll see this at work in our weekly LiveTalk interviews. For these articles on our site, we’ve expedited the workflow of sharing these conversations in multiple formats. They are then validated by two layers of human review.
2. To aid in the translation of our own content into other languages, democratizing access to our content:
We work tirelessly to produce high-quality reporting leveraging vetted, credible, expert human sources and peer-reviewed research. We want this work to reach as broad an audience as possible. We may use AI-powered translation tools to reach non-English speaking readers, promoting inclusivity and accessibility. We will always have a bilingual human editor review this content before it goes live to verify its accuracy.
3. To summarize or share our own content, making it more accessible for readers with diverse preferences and needs:
AI is utilized to create concise summaries of our existing articles, or to create short videos based on our articles, making our content more accessible to readers with diverse preferences and needs.
4. To upsample existing images to make our website a better place to experience multimedia journalism:
Upsampling is the increasing of the spatial resolution of an image while keeping the 2D representation of that original image. We typically use upsampling to eliminate the pixelation effect that arises when a low-resolution image is displayed on a relatively large frame. We do not create nor alter images to deceive.
5. To summarize our own survey findings and parse the results:
Being Patient distributes surveys to our community that then require significant data analysis to understand the survey results. We use AI tools to help us analyze the open ended comments and summarize findings.
6. To help more easily navigate the vast amount of content on our website and find answers to their questions:
We will explore safe, secure, smart ways to leverage AI to assist readers in finding the information they are looking for on our website, faster or more easily.
We recognize AI is imperfect and can make mistakes.
AI helps the world work faster. But sometimes working faster means making mistakes. If and when AI tools are used in research or reporting, the primary reporter employing this technology will be responsible for ensuring it does not give rise to errors.
We recognize that this is a fast-moving space — and we’ll keep our policy up to date.
AI technology is dynamic and changing constantly. We’re keeping up with it by keeping our policy updated and accurate. No matter how technology changes the media industry, Being Patient’s priority, true to its founding mission, is to ensure we’re delivering high-quality, trustworthy journalism based on gold-standard science, vetted by credible experts. We provide reporting and learning materials our community can trust.
Last updated 25 April, 2024.
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