We asked Per Kristian to tell us how he as an AI expert and technology journalist himself uses ChatGPT and other AI tools in his daily work.
But let’s first take a step back.
When Per Kristian Bjørkeng started as a journalist at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten in 1994, the Internet in its earliest form was just starting to become available for regular people. Since then he has covered all the big technology shifts affecting us as consumers, including the introduction of smartphones and now the rise of AI.
Bjørkeng is also the author of two books about AI. The last – “Knekk ChatGPT-koden” (Crack the ChatGPT code) – is just out in an updated version.
“Will change how we work and live”
“In all these years I have not had the same feeling as I have now. This technology shift has the potential to change how we work and live in an even more fundamental way than the internet did,” says Per Kristian.
AI is nothing new. Per Kristian himself wrote his first book about AI in 2018. And in 2020 he published an interview with the language model GPT3 to show his readers that you now could have some kind of conversation with a computer.
“But nobody seemed to care. I was so enthusiastic about the magnitude and opportunities this opened up. However, hardly anyone read it,” he says.
Breakthrough when everyone could try
“The big breakthrough came when OpenAI decided to make ChatGPT available for everyone two years ago. People realised their potential only when they could try it out themselves. Since then I have only written about AI.”
As a journalist he has written about many of the more problematic aspects of AI. But he also realised there was a great need for practical information about how to use ChatGPT and other tools more effectively. This led him to write a book about it and also to run training sessions for other journalists in Aftenposten.
Must think in new ways
“It has become clear that it is a much bigger and more demanding task to use these models in a smart way than most people realise. It requires that you think in new ways. You need to be more active – and somehow be a leader for your own work. “
And then there is the main challenge: People forget to use the tools.
“I am surprised how few people use these tools extensively, since honestly they are already useful for everybody” Per Kristian says.
Will make journalism more robust
What about the quality of journalism?
Per Kristian Bjørkeng is convinced that in the short term AI will make journalism more robust. One reason is that journalists will be able to use many more sources faster.
“A chatbot is like a research assistant who not only gives you access to more sources, but also helps you review enormous amounts of material.”
But do not ask the language models for the correct answers, warns Per Kristian. Rather you should use them as idea partners and assistants.
One important change for journalists is that the chatbots can now handle context windows of up to 5 million characters. The context window is how much information a chatbot remembers in one conversation. These enormous context windows allow the journalist to input much more information than before – even documents he or she doesn´t have time to read themselves.
So what does the AI expert himself do as a journalist? How does he get help from ChatGPT and other tools in his daily work?
The AI expert’s tips
Here are some of Per Kristian’s tips to journalists and other people who want to get the most out of AI tools in their work:
Use chatbots to read and summarise material you do not have time to read
“I was interviewing the historian Yuval Noah Harari about his latest book. I did not have time to read a large part of the book. But I had the PDF of the book and uploaded it to Notebook LM from Google. From there I got a good summary and answers to questions. And I saved several hours of work.”
Build your own tools
Per Kristian says he has no programming skills. However, he has already developed two tools that are being used in Aftenposten’s newsroom. One is a language tool, the other is a tool to display book reviews better on a mobile device.
“You do not need to be able to code. Instead you can use the chatbot as your programming assistant.”
It can be a long process of “try and fail”, but the bot will guide the non-coder on his/her way through the process.
Use Perplexity
“The go-to AI tools for journalists should be Perplexity Pro,” recommends Per Kristian.
“Much of my work is to collect information on the Internet and get an overview. I could not do this without Perplexity. It not only collects information, but reads and analyses it, and gives me all the sources of where the information was found.”
Use NotebookLM for an overview of a single project
Per Kristian often uses Google’s NotebookLM to store the information and analyse single projects. NotebookLM has the ability to make summaries, timelines, Q&A and other versions of the content uploaded to it.
What about ChatGPT?
“It is also a very good alternative,” says Per Kristian.
He adds that the free version of ChatGPT was rather poor before this summer. But now the free version is based on the much better language model 4.0mini. There is no longer as big a difference in the performance of the free versus the paid version of ChatGPT.
