Readers can now sign up for ARLnow’s AI-written email newsletter

For the past few weeks, ARLnow has been experimenting with an automated email newsletter that’s written almost entirely by AI.

The “ARLnow AM” newsletter sends at 8 a.m. each weekday morning and summarizes that day’s Morning Notes and the past day’s local news articles.

Aside from the headlines, the intro and the article summaries are all written by the GPT-4 generative AI model. Further, the email’s design was mostly coded by GPT-4 and the creation and sending of the email each morning requires no human intervention.

The idea behind the email was to give readers a morning alternative to our venerable Afternoon Update email without needing to use scarce additional staff resources.

The newsletter is admittedly not perfect. Let’s list the ways:

• We’re still working to refine the design. Coding an email newsletter that’s compatible with all email clients is much harder than it sounds.
• Sometimes the AI-written article blurbs miss factual nuances in stories.
• The AI-written intros are, for lack of a better term, corny. They’re also a bit repetitive. We’re trying to figure out ways to improve it.
• At this point, we have not included any local advertising. (According to our polling, at least, the ads from local businesses on ARLnow are seen as a generally positive feature of the site.)

So, the bottom line is that this is experimental and the blurbs should not be entirely relied upon for decision-making purposes. But, if you want a front seat to seeing how AI can be applied in local media, we’re offering a chance for readers to sign up and check it out.
 

Note that this is on a separate mailing list, so signing up will not affect an existing Afternoon Update or ARLnow Press Club subscription.