Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI into their newsgathering, production, distribution, and busi- ness functions—far more time than I’d planned to spend, to be honest. That’s because interacting with GPT-4 is not like traditional web searching. Instead, it’s better evoked by a term that was popular back in the early days of Web 1.0: web surfing. A dia- logue develops. A flow state takes over. You ask GPT-4 a ques- tion and it responds right away with highly relevant informa- tion, not just a series of links. So then you immediately think of more questions and ask those. Thus the process of discovery that can often feel halting and frustrating using traditional search methods— “Oh, I guess that link isn’t really about AI and journalism at all . . .”— feels more like steady progress toward greater awareness and understanding. This, I believe, is a huge part of what’s fueling the immense pop- ularity of GPT-4’s sibling, ChatGPT. The experience itself is so responsive and self-propelling that a kind of intellectual esca- lation kicks in: asking one question makes you want to ask ten. This phenomenon, I also realized, was a big part of the story I should tell in this chapter. Initially, I had assumed that I would highlight automated journalism, describing how news orga- nizations are already using databases and template-driven AI systems to produce thousands of stories about corporate earn- ings reports, weather forecasts, sports events, and more. But while automated journalism does represent a strategic oppor- tunity for news organizations, conversing with GPT-4 took me down a different path. 84