The recent flurry, or rather blizzard, of announcements of new variants of generative AI have brought a storm of hype and fright. OpenAI's ChatGPT already appeared to be a gamechanger, but now this week's new version, GPT-4, is another leap ahead. GPT-4 can generate enough text to write a book, code in every computer language, and – most remarkably – "understand" images. If your mind is not boggled by the potential of this, then you haven't been paying attention. I have spent the past five years researching how artificial intelligence has been changing journalism around the world.

How have publishers evolved and what do they see ahead? Amid rising fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will threaten journalists' jobs and take over the newsroom, the Journalism AI report – a project by Polis in collaboration with Google News Initiative – sought to find out how exactly AI technologies are being applied to journalism. However, AI is a'significant part of journalism already but it is unevenly distributed' and news organizations are already applying aspects of intelligent technology in their operations, to help them work more efficiently and improve monetization. "One of the key aspects of AI and journalism is that it allows the whole journalism model to become more holistic, with a feedback loop between the different parts of the production and dissemination process" Artificial intelligence systems can be useful in helping newsrooms to categorize content or information at scale for different news gathering purposes. For example, since 2015 The Associated Press have been using a management tool, SAM, which algorithmically sifts through social media platforms to alert the newsroom on likely breaking news events.

Artificial intelligence is now commonly used in journalism for anything from combing through large datasets to writing stories. To help you prepare for the future, the Journalism AI team at Polis, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), put together a training module seven things to consider before adopting AI in your news organisation. "Keep in mind that this is not a manual for implementation," writes professor Charlie Beckett who leads Journalism AI. "The recommendations will help you reflect on your newsroom AI-readiness but they won't tell you how to do design a strategy. We link to more resources that might help you with that and we hope to produce more training resources ourselves in the near future." For more insights into the Journalism AI report, you can watch this three-minute video, as well as Charlie Beckett's presentation of the report at its launch event.