ISTANBUL

Taiwan has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) “news agent” to “streamline” the work of its journalists at its official news agency, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Thursday.

CNA's Media Lab on Thursday showcased the AI agent called "Chih Ming" and its various capabilities, such as fact-checking, typo detection, and caption recommendation.

"CNA has been cautious in keeping its professional integrity. The development of the AI editing assistant is aimed at optimizing our staff's working procedure rather than to replace them," CNA President Anne Hu Wan-ling said.

Its fact-checking function features a chatbot called "AskCNA," which uses a retrieval-augmented generation model capable of providing a timeline of an event by drawing on CNA's reports since 2022.

The AI agent can also collect data from various reports in multiple languages and create a draft in Chinese. It can also change the angle or structure of the draft based on a user's request.

It can be used to speed up time-consuming tasks like information gathering and fact-checking, allowing reporters to focus on on-site fieldwork and in-depth reporting, Media Lab said.

The program was created over the course of more than a year, with support from Google's Taiwan News Digital Co-Prosperity Fund and the nDX Taiwan News Digital Transformation initiative.