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AI tools for journalists: what they can do, what they cannot, and how to check

Most guides on AI in journalism are written by universities and vendors. This one is written for the desk: which tasks are safe to hand over, which are not, and how to catch the mistakes before a reader does.

Tasks where AI tools are already reliable enough

  • Transcription of interviews and press conferences, with a listen-through of the quotes you will actually use.
  • Summarising long documents to decide what deserves a full read. The summary is a map, not the territory.
  • First drafts of routine items built from source material you already trust: a results table, a council agenda, a weather warning.
  • Translation for understanding, not for publication, unless a fluent editor reviews the output.

Tasks where they fail in predictable ways

  • Facts without sources. A model asked for a number will produce a plausible number. Ask instead for the number with the document it came from, then open the document.
  • Quotes. Never publish a quotation a model produced. Quotes come from recordings and documents.
  • Names, dates and places in less covered regions and languages. Error rates rise where training data is thin.
  • Recency. Models do not know what happened this morning unless the tool feeds them today's sources.

A five-minute check that catches most problems

  1. Every number and name in the draft is traceable to a source you can open.
  2. Every quotation exists in a recording or document.
  3. The draft does not assert intent or guilt about a named person.
  4. Images have rights information.
  5. Someone with their name on the story has read it start to finish.

How this works in Doxx

Doxx is not a general writing assistant. It prepares drafts around a standing brief and delivers them with the sources & checks used to build them, so the five-minute check has something to check against. Editors rewrite, add reporting, cut, or reject. The methodology page describes what stays attached to each delivered item.

See what a draft with its sources attached looks like on a topic you cover.

Try it on your own editorial brief

The Free plan includes 50 credits. Set up one Stream, receive drafts for a week and decide with real material in front of you.