It has now been a year since generative artificial intelligence burst into our lives. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot was just the first tangible example of a technology capable of creating text, images, audio and, more recently, video on demand. The galloping performance of these tools increasingly blurs the boundaries between real and virtual, human and synthetic, true and false. Applied to the field of information, the perspectives are dizzying. How can you be sure that an image reflects reality? Or that a press article was indeed written by a professional journalist?
Across the Atlantic, media outlets like Sports Illustrated have published articles on their sites generated by artificial intelligence and signed by editors just as fictitious as their photos and biographies. Their readers were not informed of this. “The emergence of this technology impacts us as journalists. If misused, AI can disrupt the relationship of trust between a media outlet and its readers,” explains Alexis Brézet, editorial director of Le Figaro.
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It is with this observation that Le Figaro has decided, like other media outlets around the world, to adopt a charter on the use of generative AI within its editorial staff. “It is both an internal guide and a contract with our readers,” underlines Marc Feuillée, general manager of the Figaro group. Our responsibility is to guarantee that our articles come from the work of our editorial staff. This is what our subscribers expect from us. »
The result of the debates of a working group representative of the different editorial offices of Le Figaro (daily, Magazine, Madame Figaro, Figaro.fr) and their professions (editorial, publishing, iconography), this charter “puts in place safeguards very strong fools,” says Alexis Brézet. It thus stipulates that “Le Figaro does not intend to publish any article developed by generative artificial intelligence”, a principle which also applies to “photographs, illustrations, drawings and videos generated by AI”.
The spirit of the document, and the assurance provided to readers of Le Figaro, is that “all published content will continue to be produced and supervised by journalists from the editorial offices of Le Figaro. »
Le Figaro nevertheless does not reject artificial intelligence outright. Journalists will be able to use this technology in their preparatory work (synthesis of documents and databases, assistance with translation, etc.), before writing their articles. It can also help with layout or spelling correction, and can speed up the process of subtitling videos, or even their translation into other languages. But the group undertakes not to automate these processes.
Likewise, the editorial staff may be required to test speech synthesis software capable of reconstructing a human voice. This technology could be used to allow articles to be listened to in the voice of their authors, without the latter having to go behind a microphone. But nothing will be done without the authorization of the journalist nor without the reader being clearly informed that the voice he hears is synthetic. “Transparency is at the heart of this charter. We must not sow doubt, it is a moral contract with our readers,” insists Marc Feuillée.
The charter will evolve over the course of “the rapid changes in these innovations and the lessons that Le Figaro will draw from their use,” indicates the document. “This general framework establishes a precautionary principle in the face of dizzying technologies,” summarizes Alexis Brézet.
This document is also aimed at the designers of generative artificial intelligence, who have sucked up press content without authorization or financial compensation in order to train their models. “Le Figaro is viscerally attached to the defense of its copyright,” recalls the charter. The group recently modified the general conditions of its sites in order to refuse this indexing, as authorized by European copyright regulations. “Our message is very clear: our content is our property,” concludes Marc Feuillée.
