entirely written by a human, so what s going on? today, we re dedicating the whole programme to these questions. with me are madhumita murgia, artificial intelligence editor at the financial times, sky news science and technology editor, tom clarke, eliz mizon, from independent media cooperative the bristol cable, as well as jackson ryan, science editor at cnet. welcome to you all. and i think we should start with the basics. madhu, if i could bring you in, from the financial times, explain what we mean by aland why, particularly in terms of the role ofjournalism it has, why it s getting so much coverage now. well, so, ai is artificial intelligence and, i mean, supposedly it s a mechanical computer version of human intelligence, or at least that s the hope, right? but today, what we have is, it s basically a powerful statistical system, a computer software, which finds patterns in large amounts of data. but what this means is that it can, you know, find diagnoses from pictur
and what we re talking about today is generative ai, which is software that can actually create and generate things that include words, images, code, even video. and how widely is it being used in newsrooms, do you think? i mean, what s the financial times doing, for example? so, i think, over the last six months, it would be impossible to ignore it if you were a newsroom with a digital operation that was trying to reach people online. i think you d have to be aware and, you know, and have to be experimenting with it. most big, large news publishers are doing it the ft is. we would. we ve put out, our editor put out a letter saying we re not going to be publishing any stories that are written by ai, but we will be looking at how it might help journalists do theirjobs better, things like summarising complex documents, like, you know, tax documents or, you know, readouts from court cases, things like that, that are difficult for humans to read lots of, very quickly. it could
with governor desantis since the storm made landfall. and at my direction, fema administrator chris welch, she travelled to florida wednesday night after having been here earlier, and i approved the request within six hours at the time, governor desantis asked for a mass, a major disaster declaration. at the same time, a request from governor mcmasters of south carolina for an emergency declaration. that s a fancy way of saying just getting help immediately and all we can do under the law. and, folks, we re making federal assistance available for florida survivors whose homes or businesses damaged and destroyed. in the uk, the opposition labour party is calling for an urgent audit of the concrete in public buildings, with some hospitals and courts known to contain the potential dangerous type known as raac. more than 150 schools in england and 35 in scotland were found to contain the material and so have had to completely or partially close. investigations in wales and northe
you know, find diagnoses from pictures of x rays or it can look through lots of words and help translate them into different languages. and what we re talking about today is generative ai, which is software that can actually create and generate things that include words, images, code, even video. and how widely is it being used in newsrooms, do you think? i mean, what s the financial times doing, for example? so, i think, over the last six months, it would be impossible to ignore it if you were a newsroom with a digital operation that was trying to reach people online. i think you d have to be aware and, you know, and have to be experimenting with it. most big, large news publishers are doing it the ft is. we would. we ve put out, our editor put out a letter saying we re not going to be publishing any stories that are written by ai, but we will be looking at how it might help journalists do theirjobs better, things like summarising complex documents, like, you know, tax doc
in person classes this week due to a rise in illnesses among staff and students. school officials said the drop off in attendance was due to a mixture of viruses including covid 19 and influenza. and france s education minister announced the country will ban schoolchildren from wearing the abaya, a loose fitting full length robe worn by some muslim women, in state run schools when classes begin this month. my colleague sumi somaskanda spoke this week with us education secretary miguel cardona to discuss the challenges facing students and teachers heading back to school. secretary, thank you very much forjoining us again on bbc news. i want to start with affirmative action, because the supreme court s ruling effectively ended race conscious admissions in colleges and universities. and if you look at the state of california, the uc system hasn t been able to meet its racial diversity goals despite having ended race based admissions more than two decades ago. so how do you make