The New York Times is doing more than exploring the use of artificial intelligence, it has now hired an editorial director to take the reins of the emerging technology.
“I’m joining The New York Times as editorial director for artificial-intelligence initiatives,” Zach Seward, the co-founder of Quartz, said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday. “I’ll be leading a new team that will experiment with internal and reader-facing applications of generative AI and other machine-learning techniques.”
Seward will be taking on questions like how the news outlet’s journalism can benefit from generative AI technologies and where its journalists should “draw the red lines around where we won’t use it,” Times leadership said in a memo to staff.
Seward, who left Quartz in June to mentor a startup according to his LinkedIn profile, was most recently editor in chief of the digital business publication. He previously served as CEO and chief product officer. He is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor.
Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Deputy Managing Editor Sam Dolnick said in the memo that Seward “will build on the work that a number of teams from around the building have begun over the past six months during various A.I. explorations.”
“Among his first responsibilities will be to work with newsroom leadership to establish principles for how we do and do not use generative A.I.,” the memo continued, noting that he shares the company’s “firm belief that Times journalism will always be reported, written and edited by our expert journalists.”
But the company believes that the new tools “can assist our journalists in their work, and help us broaden our reach and expand our report,” the memo said.
The hire comes a day after Sports Illustrated owner The Arena Group fired CEO Ross Levinsohn amid ongoing fallout over its use of stories written by AI and linked to fake biographies of writers on the site. His canning followed the ouster of two other executives last week.
The SI debacle added to the list of embarrassments in the media industry since AI tools became widely available a year ago, including a series of AI-generated stories posted on the tech news site CNET that showed obvious signs of plagiarism in January and the suspension by Gannett of publication of AI-written stories after several embarrassing flubs during the summer. BuzzFeed, which shut down its newsroom in April, is also among the early adopters of AI-written content.
