Why use AI at all?

Because the parts of the job it's good at were never the journalism.

1. It gives the hours back. Transcribing a 90-minute interview, sorting 400 pages of records, pulling every date out of a court filing. Those are the tasks that eat a reporting day and burn people out of the business. A machine does them in minutes. You spend the time on interviews, verification and the story, and you go home at a reasonable hour.
2. It's a second set of eyes. Ask it to list every claim in your draft, find the sentence a reader will trip on, or spot the question you forgot to ask. It doesn't replace an editor. It catches what you'd catch yourself with more time.
3. It finds patterns in things too big to read. Thousands of comments, years of meeting minutes, a data set with no obvious shape. AI can tell you where to look. You still go look.
4. You can't cover it or catch it if you don't understand it. Synthetic images, AI-written press releases and chatbot-sourced claims are already in your inbox. Knowing how the tools work is now part of verifying anything.

What it is not for: writing your story, standing in for a source, or filling a gap in your reporting. All three are unethical.

Six rules that hold up in any newsroom

The tools will be different next year. These won't.

1. You are the byline. AI can summarize, organize, transcribe and check. It should not write your story. Every fact, quote, number and name gets verified by a human before it publishes, and the human who verifies it owns it.
2. Disclose when it matters. If AI shaped what the reader sees or hears, say so in plain language. When in doubt, disclose. Specific disclosure language is available in the AI Premium Toolkit.
3. Never feed it what you would not print. Unpublished sources, embargoed documents, internal memos and anyone's personal data stay out of tools that may train on your inputs. Read the data policy before you paste.
4. Treat output like a tip, not a document. Models carry the gaps and biases of their training data, and they state guesses with the same confidence as facts. Confirm everything against a primary source you can name.
5. Keep the receipts. Save your prompts, the outputs and each version you edited. If a story is challenged, you can show exactly what the tool did and what you did.
6. Real events, real images. Do not generate or alter images of real people or real news events and present them as photography. Before you create anything synthetic, ask why you're making it and whether it belongs in the story. If it does, label it clearly every time it appears, including in social clips.

Six questions before you open the tool

Thirty seconds, every time. If any answer makes you pause, that's the answer.

1. Is this tool cleared for my newsroom? If your outlet has a policy, follow it. If it doesn't, check with your editor.
2. Am I about to share something I shouldn't? Names of sources, unpublished documents, anything under embargo.
3. Can I verify the result myself? If you can't check it against a source you can name, don't use it.
4. Does the reader need to know AI was involved? If it substantially changed what they read, see or hear, yes. Spellcheck-level fixes don't need a label. A generated image or an AI-written summary does. What counts as substantial is your newsroom's call, and it should be written down before the story, not argued about after.
5. Would I defend this choice on the record? To an editor, a source or the subject of the story.
6. Did I turn off model training and check the security settings? If you haven't, do it before you paste anything. Here's how.

Before you publish

Tap each line as you clear it. Nothing is saved, so it resets when you leave the page.

• Every fact has a primary source I verified myself, whether AI touched it or not.
• Every quote came from a real interview or document I can produce.
• No confidential material or personal data went into a tool.
• Any AI-generated or AI-altered visual is labeled where the reader sees it.
• The disclosure line says what the AI did, in language my mother would understand.
• I saved the prompts and outputs with the story file.
• I would be comfortable explaining my AI use to the subject of the story.

Three prompts that respect the reader

Copy, paste, adjust. Each one is built so the tool cannot quietly add facts.

Fact-check my draft

Interview prep

Readability check

Free resources worth your time

• Olivia's ethics and standards page. A working example of an AI disclosure policy for an independent journalist. Copy the structure, make it yours.
• Online News Association. The AI in Journalism Initiative: practical training on prompting, transparency, copyright and verification.
• Poynter. A step-by-step guide to writing an AI ethics policy for your newsroom.

The AI Premium Toolkit

The one thing on this page that costs money, and why.

Bring this into your company, newsroom or classroom

Olivia runs hands-on AI training for reporters, editors, producers and comms teams through Media Consulting Coaches. Every session is built around your workflows and your standards. Clients include USC and the United Nations.

About Olivia Smith

Emmy Award-winning journalist, AI specialist and media trainer. Olivia spent about a decade at Disney and ABC, including as a reporter for ABC News and Good Morning America and as ABC7's first Executive Producer of Next Generation Storytelling, then worked on the Generative AI Content team at Meta. She teaches at USC Annenberg, where she created the school's first journalism-and-AI course and has developed others since, and co-hosts the Prompt Response podcast. She has contributed to numerous outlets, including CNN, 60 Minutes, Al Jazeera and Columbia Journalism Review.

More at oliviasmithonline.com. Instagram: @livnews.