The A.I. Initiatives team has logged on.
We are a small newsroom team, whom I’m thrilled to introduce below, charged with leveraging generative artificial intelligence and other forms of machine learning for the benefit of our journalists and readers, while ensuring The Times’s use of these technologies remains effective and responsible.
As we’ve staffed up, our team recently started building prototypes of A.I. tools and product features. Our initial areas of focus are machine-assisted reporting tactics that wouldn’t otherwise be possible and reader experiences that could help make The Times more accessible to more people. Guiding all of these projects are the principles that Sam shared at State of The Times: We will always use A.I. as a tool in service of our mission; transparently and ethically; and with human guidance and review.
In the next month, our team will also be making certain gen-A.I. tools available to a pilot group of journalists, to experiment with their own work and start understanding how the technology is and isn’t helpful. More details, along with training and guidance for everyone using the tools, are coming soon.
With that, I’m pleased to introduce the inaugural members of A.I. Initiatives:
Rubina Fillion is the associate editorial director of A.I. initiatives. She is a Times veteran, having worked in Opinion since 2019, most recently as director of strategy, partnering with leadership to oversee department goals, new editorial products and the annual budget process. Her projects included relaunching the company’s philanthropic fund and leading gen-A.I. experiments. In her first stint at The Times, beginning in 2007, she was a graphics editor. In between, Rubina was an editor at The Wall Street Journal and the director of audience engagement for The Intercept. She began her career as an education reporter for The Gwinnett Daily Post in Georgia. She received her bachelor’s in political science and journalism from Emory and her master’s in journalism from Columbia.
Dylan Freedman is a senior machine-learning engineer. He joins us from The Washington Post, where he was a principal software engineer, most recently focused on election data. He has developed a number of powerful research tools for navigating documents and datasets with machine learning. Other personal projects have ranged from programmatic music composition to attempting an entirely new programming language. Before The Post, Dylan was the lead developer for DocumentCloud and a software engineer at Google. He graduated from Harvard, with a bachelor’s in computer science and music, and from Stanford with a master’s in journalism.
Duy Nguyen is a senior machine-learning engineer. This is Duy’s second tour at The Times, having worked in Opinion Graphics as part of the 2021-22 fellowship class. Since then, he’s been a senior machine-learning engineer at the Brown Institute’s Local News Lab at Columbia Journalism School, helping newsrooms use A.I. to solve complex business problems. In 2021, he was the lead developer of Gumshoe, an A.I. document ranking tool that is now a widely used DocumentCloud extension. Duy graduated from New York University, where his course of study — majoring in data science with minors in English and journalism — perfectly captures what he’s here to do.
Juliana Castro Varón is the senior design editor. She is a designer, and the founder and design director of Cita Press, which publishes open-access books by women. Her work with A.I. includes studying the history of image manipulation as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, teaching a Harvard Graduate School of Design class on collaborating with A.I., and consulting on Mozilla’s Creative Media Awards for responsible use of A.I. Juli is fluent in Spanish and Italian. She received her bachelor’s in graphic design from the National University of Colombia and her master’s in design from the University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright Scholar.
It’s a staggeringly talented team with a wide range of experience in journalism, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Each colleague is brimming with ideas and stood out, even among very competitive applicant pools, for the depth of their skills in the field, thoughtfulness about applying A.I. at The Times, and eagerness to collaborate with colleagues.
As newsroom engineers, Dylan and Duy will also be members of Ben Koski’s Interactive News Technology team. Juli will likewise be in Digital News Design, led by Andrew Kueneman. Thanks to Ben and Andrew, their teams, and our recruiters, Gloria Clark, Fatima Gilbert and Saraly Guerrero, for partnering on a great search.
Rubina, Dylan and Duy have already started, and Juli will start in June. Please join me in congratulating them on their new roles.
Read more in this guidance from Deputy Managing Editor Sam Dolnick and Editorial Director for A.I. Initiatives Zach Seward, originally adopted March 14, 2024.
As we embark on experiments that make use of generative A.I in the newsroom and Opinion, these principles will guide our work and clarify why and how we plan to use the technology:
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here