Three years ago Sinead Boucher took over the country's biggest publisher of news from Aussie owners who gave it away "like a set of steak knives." In the absence of big backers and the government backing away from funding journalism, does its future now depend on getting money from Google and Facebook? And does she still have the Stuff staff on board for the future?

Three years ago Sinead Boucher took over the country's biggest publisher of news from Aussie owners who gave it away "like a set of steak knives".

In the absence of big backers and the government backing away from funding journalism, does its future now depend on getting money from Google and Facebook? And does she still have the Stuff staff on board for the future?

"We have to make sure that (AI) generates value for journalism. Because if we don't get it right, in this current wave of disruption, I think that wave is going to wash right over us," Stuff owner Sinead Boucher told an Asia Pacific summit of the International News Media Association (INMA) in July.

AI services like Google's Bard and Microsoft Bing Chat and Open AI's ChatGPT respond to simple prompts from users and then summarise information scraped from the internet - including news produced at great cost by publishers.

Boucher warned other media executives present not to repeat the "mistakes of the past" by allowing offshore tech companies free access to their content again.

The likes of Google and Facebook made much more money out of their content online in the past 20 years than the news media outfits which produced in the first place.

But generative AI is also a tool news media are using for journalism. Some are even calling it "an editorial co-pilot".

When Sky TV appointed a new CFO this week, subscriber service BusinessDesk reported Ciara McGuigan had previous experience in media, telecoms and retail. Sky's CEO Sophie Moloney said she was excited about McGuigan joining the team.

The author of that story was ChatGPT. BusinessDesk uses it to turn simple statements from the stock exchange into online stories.

"They can assist in research or in the creation graphics. They can also allow us to replace a lot of repeatable internal processes," Boucher told Mediawatch.

"We've instituted a really clear set of guidelines for it to be used. We're very much at the experimentation stage . . . but there always has to be human in the loop," she said.

Stuff recently cut the numbers of staff producing and printing its newspapers. Could AI be deployed for those tasks? …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details