Welcome to the Knight Center’s new online course, “Generative AI for journalists: Discovering what data can do,” organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas in partnership with Hacks/Hackers. Generative AI is pushing the envelope of how journalists use data. This course will equip you with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate the next generation of computing.
In this four-week course, held from November 20 to December 17, 2023, you’ll learn hands-on skills like how to make your data machine-readable, plug your data into generative AI models, and share your new AI tools with others.
Watch the video above and read on for more details.
Through hands-on tutorials over the next four weeks, we want to help you get in-the-know by training you on practical applications and concepts integral to generative technologies. This course will introduce you to the machine learning domain by building up specific skills week over week, leaving you prepared for the next generation of generative AI applications and workflows only now entering newsrooms.
We will build up your AI expertise such that you will be able to participate in AI policy formulation and implementation in your organization. Finishing this course will allow you to:
This course is for journalists who may have heard of generative AI before and would like to begin engaging with these technologies on a more practical basis, whether to be better prepared for the future of computing or to improve their data journalism practice with new capabilities made possible by machine learning.
No coding experience is necessary, nor will technical skills be assumed. Course videos will introduce all prerequisite skills at your pace, and we’ll make sure your computing environment is properly set up to download and run your own language models.
We’ll also provide you with plenty of exercises to practice the skills using your own data at your own pace. These exercises will be available asynchronously, and the instructor will be around to answer any questions you may have.
Introduction Module – Generative AI For Journalists
Welcome to the course! We’ll begin by diving into the recent history of generative AI through a study of successful AI projects instructor Sil Hamilton has observed while working with newsrooms and organizations across the industry. Next, we’ll get you set up with the required tools we’ll be using to discover AI during the course. We’ll also set aside time to go through what you’ll be learning — the exercises and discussions throughout the course will encourage you to try these techniques on your own datasets.
This module will cover:
Module 1 – But What Are Models? (November 20 – 26, 2023)
What is called generative AI today is built on the success of machine learning models capable of understanding the world around us through text and images. We’ll develop an intuitive understanding of what is, and is not, possible with generative AI models today by looking at what makes these models tick.
This module will cover:
Module 2 – Discover The Data In Your Documents (November 27 – December 3, 2023)
Generative models talk to each other through text. Learn how to see your data in new ways by making your data — and your newsroom — “AI ready” by converting your unstructured documents into structured formats via optical character recognition (OCR) and embeddings, the fundamental unit of meaning for generative AI models. Embed your articles, documents, sources, and more.
This module will cover:
Module 3 – Run And Use AI Models (December 4 – 10, 2023)
With your data cleaned and structured, it is now time to use generative models to transform your data in interesting and useful ways. Learn how to run a variety of multimodal models both in the cloud and on your local computer with LangChain, a framework for learning language models into conversational “agents” capable of many things: trawling your archives, summarizing documents, and rearranging your sources in new ways.
This module will cover:
Module 4 – Putting It All Together (December 11 – 17, 2023)
Now that you’ve created your very own agent using LangChain, learn how to share it with the wider world by packaging and deploying it with the help of Hugging Face Spaces — an easy-to-use hosting platform for machine learning applications suitable for use in your newsroom.
This module will cover:
Sil Hamilton is AI researcher-in-residence at Hacks/Hackers, a network of journalists who rethink the future of news through talks, hackathons, and conferences.
A machine learning researcher at McGill University exploring the intersection of AI and culture, Sil has published research at NLP conferences like ACL, AAAI, and COLING. His work exploring the limits of language models has been discussed by Wired, The Financial Times, and Le Devoir.
Sil has given talks on AI and the newsroom at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia; the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sil has consulted for The Associated Press on AI policies and serves as technology advisor at Health Tech Without Borders, a non-profit seeking to mitigate healthcare crises with digital tools.
Students will need a computer with an internet connection. The computer should be a laptop or desktop running an operating system like MacOS, Windows, or Linux. Mobile devices like phones and tablets are not recommended, as the tools we will be using do not support mobile platforms.
We will be using the below resources:
JupyterLab Desktop, an all-in-one application for running language models in a Python environment. You can download the program for Windows and MacOS, and it is recommended to do this before the course starts. For those whose computers are not modern, we recommend using the completely online Google Colaboratory. This will require a Google account.
Hugging Face, a website for accessing language and image models. We recommend making a free account to access certain features and models to be demonstrated in this course.
A certificate of completion is available for students who meet all course requirements. The Knight Center will verify if these requirements have been satisfied every week. Once verification is completed, participants will receive a confirmation message containing detailed instructions on downloading the certificate.
To be eligible for a certificate, you must:
Watch the weekly video classes and read the weekly readings
Achieve a minimum score of 70% on the weekly quizzes. Retaking the quizzes multiple times is permissible, and only the highest score attained will be recorded.
Create OR reply to at least one discussion forum each week
The certificate of completion is included in the $95 course fee. No formal course credit of any kind is associated with the certificate.
Our certificate’s primary purpose is to acknowledge and validate a participant’s active involvement in the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas online course.
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