Journalists are trained to find the needle in a haystack, but doing so on a breaking news timeline can be challenging. To speed up the document review, the reporters leaned on a pre-built internal tool called WSJPT (a play on ChatGPT). The tool standardizes basic LLM requests across reporting projects, including prompts for summarization, classification, and image description. In this case, the reporters used the tool to summarize every page of every document scraped from the county portal.
“WSJPT” is indeed very cute!
The leverage these tools provide — the absolute ease with which they will dance through dumpsters full of documents — is breathtaking. Of course, this kind of search should only be a starting point … but the point is, previously, this kind of search simply was not possible.
That’s via Context Window, a newsletter about AI’s impact on media and publishing — a new favorite.