The Guardian turns to AI to generate its headlines

The Guardian is a very serious newspaper and, when it emerged that some media organisations were using AI to generate news articles, the left-leaning outlet decided it must take a strong stance.

Editor Katherine Viner last year put out a statement on how the Guardian would be using AI in its journalism – in short, to make it an even more serious newspaper.

“Any use of these tools will focus on what is valuable and worth protecting at the Guardian: serious reporting that takes time and effort, carefully uncovers the facts, holds the powerful to account, and interrogates ideas and arguments,” Viner wrote.

A few months on, that approach seems to have softened. At a conference last week one of its tech hacks unveiled a new in-house AI tool designed to…generate fun headlines.

The tool, which at present has not been used for any of the paper’s published pieces, has been called Guillemot, because “it sounds a bit like Guardian and has LLM in it,” according to the hack.

Users feed the tool copy from an article and it produces either a news headline or a ‘light’ headline, which includes an auto-generated pun. Serious journalism at its finest.

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