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All About Jazz & Technology
All About Jazz was born on the internet in 1995.
At the time, the web itself was an emerging technology, and its potential was far from obvious. We saw something different: an opportunity to connect jazz musicians, listeners, writers, venues, presenters and businesses in ways that had never before been possible.
That willingness to explore new technology has been part of All About Jazz ever since.
Over the past three decades, we have used databases, content-management systems, automated event feeds, email newsletters, streaming media, APIs, cloud computing and other technologies to build services that a relatively small organization could not otherwise provide at our scale.
Artificial intelligence is the latest chapter in that story.
We are excited about its possibilities. We are also approaching it the same way we have approached every significant technology during our history: pragmatically, thoughtfully and with people ultimately responsible for how it is used.
Technology Should Expand Human Capability
Our interest in AI begins with a simple question:Can this technology help people do better work, accomplish more, or spend less time on tasks that machines can reasonably handle?
At All About Jazz, the answer is increasingly yes.
We use AI as a strategic and organizational resource. It can help us research ideas, analyze information, organize complex projects, develop working documents and explore possibilities much more rapidly than we could before.
Our programmers use AI-assisted development tools to help write, troubleshoot and improve software. The programmers still make the decisions and remain responsible for the code.
We are developing an AI-assisted editorial layer that can check spelling, punctuation, grammar, All About Jazz house style and submission guidelines. The purpose isn't to replace editors or rewrite a contributor's voice. It is to automate mechanical work so editors can concentrate on the things that require editorial judgment.
We are also exploring AI for repetitive operational tasks such as identifying spam accounts, organizing and enriching information, aggregating events, improving musician pages and processing news announcements.
In each case, the objective is the same:
Use technology for what technology does well so people have more time for what people do well.
Assistance Is Not the Same as Authorship
One of the difficulties with discussions about AI is that the phrase "uses AI" can describe dramatically different things.Correcting a misplaced comma with AI isn't the same as asking AI to write an article.
A programmer using an AI coding assistant isn't the same as turning software development over to a machine.
Using AI to organize research for a strategic document isn't the same as asking AI to determine an organization's strategy.
Generating an illustration isn't the same as creating a documentary photograph.
And using AI to help develop a work of fiction raises different questions from using it to check whether a submitted article follows All About Jazz house style.
We think those distinctions matter.
Artificial intelligence can assist, suggest, analyze, organize, correct, visualize and create. The degree of human involvement—and therefore the appropriate level of disclosure and oversight—depends on what the technology is being asked to do.
Human Judgment Remains the Final Authority
This is the most important principle governing our use of AI.Technology assists the work. People remain responsible for it.
AI does not determine what music All About Jazz covers. It doesn't decide whether an album is good or bad. It doesn't determine what a writer thinks about a performance. It doesn't establish our editorial direction, business strategy or institutional values.
Those decisions belong to people.
The same principle applies when we automate work that previously required human intervention.
For example, if AI eventually helps us moderate fraudulent or spam accounts, it will be applying rules developed through years of human experience. If it helps enforce our editorial standards, those standards were created by our editors. If it helps complete musician information, we remain responsible for the accuracy and usefulness of what appears on the site.
Automation can extend human judgment. It should not eliminate human accountability.
Transparency Matters
We don't believe every use of artificial intelligence requires an announcement.Correcting punctuation, checking house style or assisting a programmer is part of the process behind the work, just as many other software tools have been for decades.
But when AI materially participates in creating something a reader could reasonably assume was created entirely by a person, we believe transparency matters.
That is why our AI-assisted fiction identifies the respective roles of the person who conceived the story and the technology used to help create it. We have also established separate guidelines governing the kind of AI-assisted fiction we will publish.
The same principle guides our approach to AI-generated imagery and other creative applications.
Our goal isn't to attach an AI label to everything touched by software. It is to give readers meaningful information when knowing AI's role materially affects their understanding of what they are reading or viewing.
We Understand the Concerns
Our enthusiasm for artificial intelligence does not mean we are indifferent to the circumstances surrounding its development.The rapid expansion of AI raises legitimate questions involving energy consumption, natural resources, data-center development, copyright, employment, education, economic concentration and the effects of increasingly powerful technology on society.
Those questions obviously deserve serious consideration.
We don't pretend to have answers to all of them, nor is All About Jazz the appropriate forum for resolving every debate surrounding artificial intelligence.
But embracing a useful technology doesn't require embracing every consequence of how that technology is developed, financed or deployed.
We believe technological progress should ultimately benefit people. We also believe responsible regulation, thoughtful development and public accountability have roles to play as AI becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life.
Those beliefs are entirely compatible with our excitement about what AI can help All About Jazz accomplish.
Experimentation Has Always Been Part of All About Jazz's DNA
We don't know today every way we will be using artificial intelligence five years from now.Neither does anyone else.
We will experiment.
Some applications will become permanent parts of All About Jazz. Others may prove less useful than expected and disappear. New capabilities will emerge. Standards will evolve. Our own thinking will undoubtedly evolve with them.
That is not substantially different from the way we approached the internet in 1995.
We experimented then, too.
Over time, those experiments became All About Jazz and Jazz Near You: interconnected platforms serving musicians, listeners, writers, venues, presenters and other members of the international jazz community.
Thirty-one years later, artificial intelligence has given us a similar feeling of possibility.
In fact, we haven't been this excited about a new technology since that thing called the internet.
The Mission Comes First
All About Jazz does not exist to promote technology.It exists to promote jazz discovery and to build digital infrastructure that helps jazz thrive.
Technology is one of the ways we accomplish that mission.
When a new tool helps our writers write, our editors edit, our programmers build, our readers discover, our musicians connect, or our small organization accomplish something that previously would have required considerably more time or resources, we are going to explore it.
We will do so thoughtfully.
We will distinguish assistance from authorship.
We will be transparent when transparency matters.
We will continue to evaluate the consequences as well as the benefits.
And people will remain accountable for the result.
The tools will change. They always have.
Our responsibility won't.
