Eagle-eyed readers of The Oregonian recently noticed a disclosure at the end of several stories published on OregonLive.com this month. “This story was drafted with the assistance of generative AI,” it says, “and reviewed by Oregonian editorial staff.”
That’s a significant advance in the newspaper’s use of artificial intelligence to write story drafts.
Editor Therese Bottomly announced in 2023 that The O would use AI to summarize real estate transactions. The more recent examples, however, were rewrites of press releases: one from Travel Portland on Food Cart Week, and another from the Oregon State Police describing a Clatsop County car wreck that killed a driver and injured his 9-year-old passenger.
(WW and its partner organization, the Oregon Journalism Project, do not use AI to write stories.)
Bottomly tells WW that most of The Oregonian‘s AI use centers on transcribing podcasts or translating stories into Spanish. In an email, she said it’s “hard to say” on which stories the paper would use AI, but in all instances an editor, reporter or both would review the copy before publication.
“For newsroom-generated work, we disclose on the post we used AI and that we reviewed it,” she wrote. “This is policy.”