How We’re Thinking About AI At Civil Beat

Like other workplaces, Civil Beat has some hard choices to make about AI. Our readers and supporters trust us, and keeping that trust depends on making good decisions.

Today, we published our first AI policy. We spent many months looking at available AI tools, deciding which ones could help us and which ones we should not use. Getting facts right and keeping our readers' trust matter more to us than anything else. The policy is short on purpose. AI is changing quickly, and we want to be able to change our rules when needed.

As our new policy explains, we do not want to ban every use of AI. It could help us do some simple, repetitive jobs faster and better. These include collecting information from public websites, finding out which stories interest readers most, and turning audio and video recordings into written words. We plan to keep using AI for these jobs, but people will always check its work.

In fact, AI has been working behind the scenes for years. It has helped with Google searches and calculations involving very large amounts of data. But now there are many new AI tools, including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. They all promise to work faster and think more cleverly than people.

I began working on school newspapers in junior high school, using a typewriter. Later, word processors and laptop computers changed my life. They also saved my fingers from getting sore. Years after that, the World Wide Web arrived and completely changed how I worked. It gave me access to huge amounts of information and made it easier for my stories to reach the people who could benefit from them most.

AI could bring changes just as big to the news industry.

But we also know that calling it "intelligence" can make it sound smarter than it really is. We have seen other newsrooms make mistakes when using AI. These include made-up information, unfair bias, errors and important facts that were completely missed. Their mistakes teach all of us important lessons.

For now, the only AI tool Civil Beat will continue offering directly to the public is Digital Democracy. This is a website about Hawaii's state Legislature. It uses AI to collect public testimony, campaign donations, lawmakers' votes and other information into a database that people can easily search and explore. One useful feature lets people search for a word or phrase in public testimony. They can then go straight to the exact part of a video where someone said those words. During our training sessions on the website, many people have told us that this feature alone saves them time and frustration.

We will keep watching how AI develops. As the technology changes, the ways we use it and our rules about it will probably change too. I would like to hear what you think. As always, we will keep our readers at the center of our decisions and let you know what we are doing.