Should top Australian journalists fear ChatGPT?
Icon Reputation’s Mark Forbes investigates whether ChatGPT has what it takes to stand up against some of Australia’s best known journalists, asking whether the AI chatbot might hold some ‘opinions’ of its own.
Like many from a media background, I’ve been curious about ChatGPT’s capacity to assist, or even replace, journalists. I’ve seen some more than adequate AI-generated items but wondered about its capacity to advocate and emote – a key component of feature and opinion pieces.
Chris Dodds, Icon’s Managing Director of Growth & Innovation, has been running a series of ChatGPT trials, and we were determined to give it a tough task. We asked ChatGPT to produce opinion pieces on a current, nuanced topic – the Referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament – in the style of several prominent Australian journalists (Virginia Trioli, Laura Tingle, Peter Hartcher and Alan Jones). You can read the full text of the experiment here.
This involved several challenges, ChatGPT’s database is pre-2022, so it was unaware the referendum had already been called.
