4 go-to AI tools that made life as a journalist much easier

Journalism is a very demanding job. If you work as a sub-editor, you are the last checkpoint before the content goes to the readers, and your actions can either make a good impression or turn the newspaper into a meme for the coming days. 

That being said, incorporating some AI tools into everyday work can do wonders. It can make your work faster and help you avoid many potential "job-risking" and "meme-making" mishaps.

Even two years ago, many discouraged using AI tools like ChatGPT. Just like back in 2008-09 when using social media was discouraged by many. 

While there are reasons to exercise caution while using AI too much, there are also reasons to motivate people to use them as long as they help improve the work and make lives a bit easier. 

Here are four of the AI tools that I use on a regular basis. 

Grammarly

Every word processor, whether Microsoft Word or Google Docs, has its own spelling and grammar checkers built in. While they come in handy, they are nowhere close to the AI-powered Grammarly. 

Grammarly not only helps you detect potential misspellings faster, but it also suggests different ways you can rewrite the sentence. If you find yourself in a situation where a sentence is getting too long or too complicated, Grammarly will help you break it into one or multiple simpler ones. 

During my everyday work, Grammarly helps me identify the words that are less used and might be unknown to my readers and tell the easier ones. 

My suggestion while using Grammarly would be not to let it take over the whole work. Always review the changes before accepting them, as a full Grammarly-approved article might be very dull and boring for the readers to read.

Otter.ai

In a newsroom, we are often tasked with the impossible. This happens especially in the online section, where no one likes to be second, and the quickest way is often considered the best way. 

Suppose you have a 20-minute speech of someone that you need to file a story on. You have two options in front of you. The first one is listening to the audio and typing out the important bits. The second one is uploading the whole audio to Otter.ai, which will transcribe the whole thing and make bullet points for you. 

Otter also works magic when it's a live thing going on on the television. All you need to do is hit the record button on your phone using the Otter.ai app and keep it close to the television. 

The point to be noted is that it will only work for English. There are multiple ways to transcribe Bengali [and translate them to English] as well. But let's keep it as a trade secret for now. 

Canva Pro

The paid version of Canva has AIs built-in for nearly everything you need to deal with basic (sometimes advanced) graphics designing. It helps me with everything, from generating AI images to enhancing low-res ones, during a regular workday. 

Canva Pro also comes with both image and video editing features and a vast library of content, which means you will not have to waste any time finding vectors or graphics or backgrounds that you might need to add to your design. It also allows exports in animated GIFs, which greatly helps make animated website banners. 

Users under Canva's team subscription can share their work with other members and work on the projects simultaneously. 

Canva Pro comes with a nice handy AI button on the bottom left corner of the panel, where you can write anything you want, and it will just bring that right in front of you. 

What I love the most about Canva is how powerful yet easy-to-use the whole app is. 

ChatGPT

The paid version of ChatGPT is a versatile tool. You can basically do anything with it, whether it's a translation or formatting a huge set of data that would take days of manual work. It is something that I did while working on the microsite of the 2024 Bangladesh Elections. 

Over the past two years, I also replaced Google with other AI tools, even before the search engine decided to incorporate Gemini into its searches. The reason is being able to give a wide range of prompts and GPT working on them accordingly. 

Suppose you came up with a headline that you really like but are not sure whether it makes any sense. You can just ask ChatGPT, "Hey, does this headline make any sense?" and it will tell you whether it does or not. You can also ask it what the headline means, and it will analyse it and tell you more in seconds. 

News headlines might be small in size, but they always need to be precise and free from any ambiguity. Getting help from GPT often helps me find better headlines that drive more engagement.

ChatGPT also does wonders with quick translations. I would go as far as saying that this works better than both Google and Bing. You just need to give it smaller segments.

However, there's another issue with it. ChatGPT will do too good of work with the translation that any mistake that it makes will be harder to pinpoint. So, no matter how well the translation ends up, you always need to make sure you read the whole thing again. 

Will AI take over our jobs?

There's a myth going around that artificial intelligence is coming for our livelihoods and may cause job cuts in the near future. An idea that I don't fully believe in. 

Yes, AIs can now do many things that previously required a human. But so can many other tech that we have already built over the past century or so. 

AI helps make our work faster, just like other tools. If anything, not being able to use these tools might be responsible for job losses, I believe. 

It is now up to us to decide which AI tools we can incorporate into our day-to-day tasks to make ourselves faster and, thus, more efficient.