CNA debuts AI news agent

Taipei, Aug. 28 (CNA) Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) has unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) news agent, named "Chih Ming" (志明編輯助手) designed to streamline the work of its journalists.

During a showcase event in Taipei on Thursday, CNA's Media Lab demonstrated the AI's various capabilities, which include fact-checking, typo detection and caption recommendation.

"CNA has been cautious in keeping its professional integrity. The development of the AI editing assistant is aimed at optimizing our staff's working procedure rather than to replace them," said CNA President Anne Hu Wan-ling (胡婉玲).

Professors and students from journalism and related fields of eight universities were invited to the event to mark CNA, the oldest news agency in the Mandarin-speaking world, integrating AI into its operations.

The fact-checking function features a chatbot named "AskCNA" that uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model. It can provide a timeline of an event by drawing on CNA's reports since 2022.

CNA is considering expanding the chatbot's database to include decades of content if more investment is made.

Additionally, the AI agent can collate information from reports in multiple languages and generate a Chinese draft of around 800 words.

It can also adjust the angle or structure of the translation based on a user's prompt. However, its translation from Chinese into other languages is currently limited to literal translation, pending further development by the Media Lab.

According to the Media Lab, by using the AI agent to streamline time-consuming tasks like information gathering and fact-checking, reporters can focus more on on-site fieldwork and in-depth reporting.