The New York Times officially introduced AI tools in its newsroom in February 2025, which assist staff in creating summaries, editing, coding, and writing. The newspaper announced via an internal email that both product development and editorial staff will receive AI training, and they have introduced an internal AI tool called Echo for summarising articles and briefings.
The new editorial guidelines describe in detail the permitted uses of Echo and other AI tools, encouraging staff to use them for editing suggestions, summaries, social media promotional materials, and SEO headlines. The company's generative AI principles, adopted in May 2024, state: Generative AI can help with certain parts of our process, but journalists must always direct and own work. At the same time, strict limitations have also been introduced—AI cannot be used to write or significantly modify articles, circumvent paywalls, input third-party copyrighted materials, or publish AI-generated images or videos without explicit labelling.
In addition to Echo, the Times has also authorised numerous other AI tools, including the GitHub Copilot programming assistant, Google Vertex AI for product development, NotebookLM, NYT's own ChatExplorer, OpenAI's non-ChatGPT API, and certain Amazon AI products. Interestingly, the introduction of AI tools coincides with a period when the newspaper is engaged in a legal dispute with OpenAI and Microsoft, as they claim that ChatGPT was trained on Times content without permission. Meanwhile, other players in the media industry have also begun to employ AI solutions to varying degrees in their editorial work.
Sources:
1.
Jess Weatherbed
2.
Dwaipayan Roy
3.
Noor Al-Sibai
