Here's how WCPO 9 is using artificial intelligence in our journalism

CINCINNATI — The use of artificial intelligence is on the rise, and here at WCPO 9, we're taking a thoughtful approach about how to make sure we use it responsibly.

You may have noticed disclaimers on certain WCPO 9 web articles about the use of AI.

Every single story starts with a journalist, and at its core is created by journalists. From pitch to interviews, a human is central to our storytelling and fact-gathering process.

Here's what we use AI for in our journalism:

1. Copy editing: We use it to go beyond just basic spell check, but also to follow the right context and style.
2. Script conversion: We serve a lot of platforms. We will, at times, write a script and convert it to another platform using AI. This includes writing for our broadcast and converting it to web, and vice versa. The journalism doesn't change - just the style and format to better match your expectations in each place we report.
3. Platform conversion: AI helps us take horizontal video storytelling you might see on our broadcast or YouTube and convert it to vertical on Instagram or TikTok, so that, again, we can make as big of an impact as possible, on as many platforms as possible.
4. Creative help: We will ask AI for help with things like headlines, social media post suggestions and teases in our newscasts. All of this is generated using our own independently gathered and written source material, but is still all reviewed by a human.

Here's what we don't use AI for:

1. Generating photorealistic images/video: This is off limits for us. Any of the pictures or video that you see across all platforms of WCPO 9 will be authentic and editorial in nature, whether gathered by us, or our news partners like the Associated Press and CNN.
2. Generating written scripts: We are still the source of writing our digital articles and our broadcast videos. We do not ask AI to write a story for us based off of interviews or research. We create the first draft before using any of the above-mentioned tools.
3. Research: Our journalists fact check everything themselves.

What kind of AI do we use?

We use a variety of different sources of AI (like Chat GPT and Claude) that are filtered through an internal AI platform. With this, we have custom prompts that help us do everything mentioned above. Our internal AI platform is designed to protect the content and information we work with so it remains private unless/until published.

The technology is evolving fast, and we'll be sure to update this story if we change anything about our use of it.