San Juan, May 20 (EFE).- GFR Media and Agencia EFE highlighted on Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are helping journalists with their work but should remain under human supervision, during a joint forum held in Puerto Rico.
“At the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, the boom in generative artificial intelligence arrived, and we started to see that there could be enormous capabilities,” said Juan Manuel Ruiz, Director of Technology and Systems at Agencia EFE.
During his presentation at the forum “AI Revolution: An Opportunity for Businesses in Puerto Rico,” Ruiz explained that EFE selected carefully developed AI prompts that could support journalists in their daily editing work.
Since then, the agency’s journalists have had access to intelligent automation resources that assist with headlines, SEO descriptions, translations, generate subheadings to structure news articles into different sections, and provide interview transcription tools.
The agency also incorporated the EFE Plus chatbot, which enables conversations with the agency’s extensive historical archive, which began in 1939.
“The power of this, as you can imagine, is enormous. It allows us to simplify some tasks for our journalists, who can continuously ask questions and investigate past events that enrich the news they need to provide today,” Ruiz said.
In his view, AI “offers a corrected version, which obviously must be evaluated by the journalist to determine whether the suggestions are appropriate.”
Increasing newsroom productivity
For his part, Carlos J. Martínez, Senior Editor of Digital Strategy and Subscriptions at GFR Media, explained that for the past year, El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora have been using a tool that increased newsroom productivity by 67%, helping process agency news stories that previously took 15 minutes to publish and now require only five.
Similarly, GFR integrated AI-powered translation tools last September to optimize its English-language section, which is available exclusively to subscribers.
“AI will help us tell these stories better because technology changes. It changes every day, but the journalistic values that guide El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora will not change. Ethics remain,” Martínez said. He added that nothing is published automatically and “everything passes through the eyes of a human being.”
The senior editor concluded that stories must continue to be written by journalists because AI “does not go to a crime scene, does not conduct an in-depth interview with the governor, and does not identify the issues that are important for the country.”
Agencia EFE is the world’s leading Spanish-language news agency, with a strong global network of journalists present in more than 100 countries. GFR Media is a Puerto Rican company operating a wide range of digital and print platforms, including El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora.
This is the third international forum organized by GFR Media and Agencia EFE in Puerto Rico as part of a partnership aimed at addressing key issues of importance for the island and the broader Hispanic world. EFE