TVBEurope talks to Sky News Tom Clarke about how the broadcaster used AI to create a news package, from writing the text to presenting it on screen
By Jenny Priestley
Published: July 27, 2023
TVBEurope talks to Sky News' Tom Clarke about how the broadcaster used AI to create a news package, from writing the text to presenting it on screen
target=_blank title=Share on LinkedIn class=share-linkedin>
There's no doubt everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and its impact on pretty much every aspect of technology at the moment.
It's an area that we're seeing lots of discussion around in the media industry, not least because of the current Hollywood strikes. Among the issues the two sides are at odds over is the use of AI in both writing content and acting.
But what impact could AI have on the news we watch? At a time when many broadcasters are striving to move as far away from fake news' as possible, could AI be beneficial to news production?
Sky News recently created and tested its first-ever AI news reporter to experiment whether generative AI could replace the role of a journalist.
It used AI to write a 300-word news article for Sky News' website as well as an accompanying 90-second TV report.
Tom Clarke and Kris Fagerlie at work on the project The idea grew out of a discussion within Sky's newsroom, Tom Clarke, science and technology editor for Sky News, tells TVBEurope. There was a lot of hype around these large language models like ChatGPT, their incredible capabilities and the potential risks that those capabilities posed, he explains. There is this other angle of how AI might replace the jobs we do. We wanted to test all of those things so we thought, why don't we test it doing the job of a journalist and push these technologies as far as we can?
In order to complete the project the Sky News team used off the shelf components rather than writing and training their own AI. The key aim, says Clarke, was to visualise and unpack some of the more esoteric or abstract ideas around AI for viewers. The team began by using ChatGPT as both a journalist and editor.
The project employed a web crawler, built by Sky News, tasked with searching specific news websites and feeding that information into ChatGPT in order to train it.
Anybody can ask ChatGPT etc to write a news story on any subject and it will do a remarkably good job generally. But it's not really doing the job of a journalist, says Clarke. Our idea was to set the chatbots up to play off each other, to sort of simulate a thought process.
That meant one bot was given prompts in order to report and the other was used as an editor. The reporter generated a story idea based on the inputs Clarke and the team gave it. The editor was given a different prompt, which was to critique the story and decide whether or not it was relevant. We gave it various prompts, relevance, newsworthy, timely, whatever, and then ran a number of cycles to and fro between the reporter and the editor, he continues. It's almost like simulating a thought process is how I understood it myself. They're both powered by the same language models, so they haven't got different brains behind them, but then you give them different prompts to try to hone that task.
The team also used Stable Diffusion, which can generate images using AI. Without human intervention, the editor chatbot generated a prompt based on the news story that was sent to Stable Diffusion in order to create an image. We didn't tell it what that prompt should be, it had to come up with its own so, explains Clarke, and then it would automatically make that request and the image was downloaded to one of our computers.
AI was further employed to create an on-screen reporter for the news story. We thought wouldn't it be fun to use one of these AIs that generate an avatar, a human-like face, Clarke continues. We used a company based in California because we looked around and theirs was the most realistic. We trained it with a few minutes of my colleague reading out old scripts of mine, nothing specific, and then manually gave it the text generated by ChatGPT.
In total, the project took around a month to complete with much of that time spent training the chatbots to write like journalists (never the easiest of tasks).
Clarke and the team wanted to show viewers the whole process of how they put the report together, and so they felt it was key to show where humans were specifically involved, which turned out to be predominantly in the edit suite.
There were moments when we were working with it and figuring out how to make this into a story when there were five of us in the room trying to make it work, he says. So we realised it's not going to be replacing us anytime soon. It did make me think, there's quite a lot of human involvement to make sure this thing gives us what we want and probably speaks to some degree to the amount of job replacement we're actually going to see in the short term.
The whole idea of using AI to generate images for both the website and TV package also raised questions around integrity. We work in the news industry, states Clarke. Realistically we'd never want to generate fake images to put on the news. We're in the news business, we're about telling people what's really going on. So I think the only way realistically we're going to be using image-generating AI is to illustrate what's going on in the world of AI. I don't think we'd ever use it to generate the images that we put on air.
Could you use an AI maybe to generate images for explanatory purposes if you really are unable to show that by any other means? Maybe it's a tool you can see applied there. But how could that be better than a really good graphic desi
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
07/10/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
IPC Expands Brazilian Presence with New Channel Partner CCATech
Industry veterans Carlos Abrah o and Bruno Lopes strengthen local support and expand IPCs prese...
20/08/2026
Zixi Enters Mauritius Market Through Strategic Deployment with MTC Jockey Club
Worlds Oldest Horse Racing Club in the Southern Hemisphere Selects Zixis Softwar...
20/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research assistant professor Tiantian Liu has received a five-year NIAID DP2 award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Di...
20/08/2026
Audiences reveal appetite for multicultural Australia on-screen 20 August 2026
Dr Georgie McClean, Dr Rebecca Huntley (L-R)
By Dr Georgie McClean and Dr Rebec...
20/08/2026
How Mavis Studio Is Expanding Live Production Teaching at Sussex
Brie Clayton August 19, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image displays a student about to mix be...
20/08/2026
Vertical Unscripted Series Legal Queens Captured with Blackmagic Design
Brie Clayton August 19, 2026
0 Comments
Reality TV veteran Eric Gardner create...
19/08/2026
As the cost of IP nears price parity with traditional SDI, Reynolds argues that ...
19/08/2026
A private 5G bubble was chosen instead of traditional broadcast RF for the race ...
19/08/2026
(L-R) Rafael Manuel and Isabel Sicat attend the Filipi ana premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 23, 2026, in Park Cit...
19/08/2026
Studio owners invited to have their say on rates cuts
The Music Producers Guild (MPG) are inviting UK-based studios to take part in an in-depth survey that ...
19/08/2026
Vintage-inspired desktop interface revealed
Harrison's latest hardware offering sees them head into the world of audio interfaces, delivering a 10-in/12...
19/08/2026
Granular effect remains locked to scale and tempo
Described as your dream granular effect , Minimal Audio's latest creation is capable of turning any s...
19/08/2026
First polyphonic SWAM instrument incoming
Audio Modeling's latest physical-modelling orchestral instrument is just around the corner, and is now availab...
19/08/2026
World Cup Games Generate 84 Billion Minutes Across FOX, Fox Sports 1 and NBCU...
19/08/2026
July brought typical peak-holiday drops in viewership, driven primarily by viewers stepping away from screens and a visible decline in reach across both traditi...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Henry joins BCE as the company accelerates its commercial strategy and expands its international presence across the media, broadcast and technology markets. He...
19/08/2026
iWedia, a leading provider of software solutions for connected TV devices, today announced a major milestone in Android platform optimization with the successfu...
19/08/2026
NTP Technology announces that ST 2110-30 audio-over-IP connectivity with AES67 and RAVENNA capabilities is now available for the brand's world-class audio i...
19/08/2026
Net Insight has been selected to provide its Nimbra platform by the service provider Big Blue Marble, formerly ORS Group, as the core media transport solution f...
19/08/2026
LiveU has supported Coventry City FC and several other top-flight UK football clubs through one of their most demanding live production challenges of the year, ...
19/08/2026
Nature Seekers Documentary Shot with Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF
Brie Clayton August 18, 2026
0 Comments
Filming endangered turtles required camera...
19/08/2026
Neyrinck Brings D-Control Consoles Back to Life on Apple Silicon with D-Control ...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Riedel Communications today announced that Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Australia, implemented a comprehensive communications infrastructure that brin...
19/08/2026
QuickLink, a leading provider of award-winning video production and remote guest contribution solutions, will spotlight a major leap forward in remote guest con...
19/08/2026
Integrated platform melds media asset management, playout automation and newsroom workflows
EMAM, PlayBox Neo and SNEWS have officially launched Nuvex, a conne...
19/08/2026
Screen Australia releases the Private Investment Toolkit to strengthen screen in...
19/08/2026
Do Aussies truly value local content? Unpacking Screen Currency 2026 with Deirdr...
19/08/2026
There's an early Christmas gift for Bookish fans, as UKTV confirms the re-commission of the hit U&alibi drama, created by and starring Mark Gatiss. Viewers ...
19/08/2026
Wednesday 19 August 2026
Sky gives sports fans the chance to watch multiple liv...
19/08/2026
On Saturday September 5 Katie Taylor will step into the ring for the fight of her life against Flora Pili in front of 80,000 fans in Croke Park. A legendary fig...
18/08/2026
SportStream 2026, a free three-day virtual event, will take place September 15-17. One registration provides access to all three days of live programming and on...
18/08/2026
BeckTV will introduce BeckFlow to the European market at IBC2026, demonstrated on the Providius stand (10.F53).
BeckFlow is a web-based schematic documentation...
18/08/2026
Boland Communications will introduce a SMPTE ST 2110 input option for its 4K monitors at IBC2026, along with a new 55-inch super-narrow bezel display for video ...
18/08/2026
Dolby Laboratories and the Seattle Seahawks have announced a partnership integrating Dolby OptiView into the Seahawks' live streaming coverage, making the S...
18/08/2026
For BMG Executive Producer of Sports Production, Graham Taylor, producing live s...
18/08/2026
TMRW Sports has appointed Rufus Hack as President of Golf, a newly created role in which he will lead the company's golf businesses including TGL presented ...
TVBEurope talks to Sky News Tom Clarke about how the broadcaster used AI to create a news package, from writing the text to presenting it on screen
