Filipino journalist upends industry’s AI doomsday fears with custom chatbot to aid in-depth reporting

Jaemark Tordecilla, a former editor-in-chief of GMA News Online and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, recently created an AI programme, built atop OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that has been configured specifically to summarise the audit reports of Philippine government agencies for journalists.

While reports from the Philippines’ Commission on Audit (COA) are likely to contain evidence of corruption, government agency documents can be dense and difficult to read and understand, Tordecilla told This Week in Asia.

Journalists in the newsrooms across the globe, not just the Philippines, are often stretched thin, forced to multitask and cover numerous topics at the same time. Tordecilla wanted to find a solution that could help reporters maximise their efficiency and cut down the time spent poring through documents.

“AI is a hot topic, yet there is little documentation about how to use AI and apply it to journalism,” he said. “So, I wanted to figure out use cases for it – if the hype is true, that this technology could change the world, then it should change journalism as well.”

His programme, dubbed COA Beat Assistant, was built using tools available in the paid version of ChatGPT that allow users to customise the AI model for specific purposes without coding. Tordecilla configured it to summarise information from the COA’s hefty executive summaries, which can be up to 50 pages long.

“[COA] reports are very valuable sources of information, and it’s there for everyone … but because of the density of the documents, it takes a lot of time to go through [it], and people see different things inside the document,” he said.

“It’s important to look through these documents to maybe uncover evidence or traces of malfeasance, yet the reporters