Taipei: Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) has unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) news agent named "Chih Ming," designed to streamline the work of its journalists. During a showcase event in Taipei on Thursday, CNA's Media Lab demonstrated the AI's various capabilities, which include fact-checking, typo detection, and caption recommendation.

According to Focus Taiwan, CNA President Anne Hu Wan-ling emphasized the organization's commitment to maintaining professional integrity, stating that the AI editing assistant is intended to optimize staff workflows rather than replace them. The event, marking CNA's integration of AI into its operations, was attended by professors and students from journalism and related fields of eight universities.

The fact-checking feature of the AI agent includes a chatbot named "AskCNA," which uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to provide timelines of events based on CNA's reports since 2022. CNA is considering expanding the chatbot's database to cover decades of content if further investment is secured.

Additionally, the AI agent can collate information from reports in multiple languages and generate a Chinese draft of around 800 words. It can adjust the angle or structure of the translation based on user prompts, although its ability to translate from Chinese into other languages remains limited to literal translation pending further development by the Media Lab.

According to the Media Lab, the AI agent helps streamline time-consuming tasks like information gathering and fact-checking, allowing reporters to focus more on on-site fieldwork and in-depth reporting. Despite the convenience of this tool, the Lab highlighted that CNA follows its generative AI application guidelines and does not directly publish AI-generated reports.

The program's development spanned over a year, made possible with support from Google's Taiwan News Digital Co-Prosperity Fund and the nDX Taiwan News Digital Transformation project.