News Corp Australia has announced the launch of NewsGPT, its own generative AI tool, which it insists will “enhance” staff capabilities “not replace them”.
Julian Delany, the company’s chief technology officer, sent a memo to staff on Tuesday, first reported by Capital Brief and seen by Crikey, which outlined what its new toy will be used for.
The memo mentioned NewsGPT would be “supporting the creative process” and “streamlining daily tasks”.
Monica Attard, former ABC Media Watch host and head of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), told Crikey the primary concern with this kind of AI is in the enforcement and policing of how it is used by staff, as well as issues in bias presented by “closed-shop” models.
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“Regardless of the LLM [large language model] being used, that’s always been the fear and the concern of media organisations, that even if prohibited explicitly, either by editorial policy or codes of conduct, that nonetheless the temptation would be there to use it to wholescale lift sentences, paragraphs, whatever,” Attard told Crikey.
“I think regardless of whether it’s an internal, bespoke LLM or an external one, that temptation must be there, and must be accounted for. It’s one thing to come up with editorial policies and codes of conduct that determine what a reporter can and can’t do, [but] how you implement them and enforce them is another matter altogether.”
Attard, who led the UTS Centre of Media Transition’s 2024 Gen AI and Journalism report, said there is also a risk of increased editorial bias since the AI is trained on the work done within the organisation, creating a “closed loop of information”.
“It comes down to then — putting in place … training around the ethical use of LLMs. There’s a chance when media organisations create their own internal mechanisms, they place less emphasis on that, because they’re training the LLM on their own work, and if they have faith in their own work, they think that’s less of a danger in terms of mis- or disinformation it can create. But of course that creates another problem, which is the problem of bias,” she explained.
“You’re creating a closed loop of information, and all media organisations have an editorial bias and editorial bent. So it goes without saying that … if it’s there, and it’s good, and it’s responsive, and it’s easy to use, then you would imagine over time that reporters would exclusively, or at least for a great part of the work that they produce [would use it], so you’re creating a possibility of a closed loop of information.”
Matthew Ricketson from Deakin University told The Sydney Morning Herald in December 2024 that News Corp was “much more likely to run campaigns and run those campaigns much more vigorously, even relentlessly, than other news outlets”, which raised issues if AI models were relying too heavily on News Corp’s coverage.
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Delany’s email described NewsGPT as bringing “the power of leading AI models ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude”.
In May 2024, the company inked a deal worth a reported $250 million over five years with AI firm OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT, but disabled access to Google Gemini for staff earlier this year, as part of a wider crackdown on unauthorised AI usage at the company. News Corp staff have also been sent memos instructing them to delete Chinese AI application DeepSeek, and the company tracked its own journalists using the popular transcription tool Otter.ai before subsequently blocking access to it in September 2024.
When Otter.ai was blocked by the company, Delany said in an email to staff that News Corp had recently undertaken “evaluation work” that included “assessing existing AI applications and tool deployments found across NCA (News Corp Australia) that currently are not approved for use”.
In February this year, Crikey reported that the company was in the early stages of trialling alternative transcription application Trint with a number of select journalists.
Crikey contacted Delany and News Corp to ask which language model NewsGPT was based on, as well as whether the company had any policies in place to stop AI replacing substantive editorial work, or for disclosures when it is substantially used in the production of a piece. A spokesperson for News Corp confirmed that the company did have policies relating to the use of AI.
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