Introducing News Explorer: An Experiment in Human-AI Collaboration

With today’s refresh of the Decrypt homepage, you may have noticed the addition of a new section with a modest footprint: a human-curated feed of AI-summarized breaking news headlines generated from sources around the web. We call this feature the News Explorer.

It’s a small but important foray into the world of AI content curation and creation for Decrypt, and we think it’s a great value-add for visitors to our homepage. 

Many publishers are now experimenting with the impressive—yet still far from perfect—capabilities of the latest generation of large language models and other AI tools. But as many other publications have noted, it’s critical to be deliberate and methodical with these approaches. 

We believe the best and most ethical course of action here is one that combines measured introductions of AI with careful human oversight, to both catch and correct errors and provide valuable training data for fine-tuning our approach.

Here’s how it works on the back end: Our custom AI tool summarizes headlines and stories from news outlets we’ve added, and a Decrypt editor checks them over for accuracy before publishing them to the News Explorer feed. Click any headline in the News Explorer and it will bring you to a landing page that has summaries of each story and a link to the source.

News Explorer is an experiment in building tech tools that augment the capabilities of our talented staff.

If successful, we also hope it can serve as a foundation for Decrypt to pursue more ambitious projects and experiments in applying AI to media.