Composer AI Assistant
Arc XP is introducing a collaborative AI Assistant, which will help journalists meet editorial standards by identifying gaps in metadata and ensuring adherence to style guides.
Context
Starting with editorial review, the new AI Assistant in Composer helps ensure every story meets your newsroom’s standards—polishing metadata, refining style, and making editorial reviews smoother than ever by helping journalists identify and meet requirements even sooner.
This is focused on an initial set of metadata fields as well as style guide suggestions that are placed in the story body.
The AI Assistant has real- time presence indication and feedback so authors and editorial teams can see where AI is working and making changes to the draft.
Additionally, the AI Assistant is built with control and visibility at the forefront so that even though direct changes can be made to the story draft, authors and editors have visibility into where all changes are made and are in control for reviewing before it is committed to the revision.
Note
Access to AI Assistant is controlled via Roles and Permissions
Metadata Review with AI Assistant
The AI Assistant will update a subset of fields in Composer automatically. This will respect the fields that are enabled or disabled as well as any customizations on prompts that already exist in Arc intelligence. These automatic modifications will only be made in additive ways or if the fields are empty upon save.
For example: If SEO keywords is not used in Composer, SEO keywords won’t be generated and if there are customizations to the Headlines prompt in Arc Intelligence Settings, the AI Assistance will refer to those instructions
Available metadata the AI Assistant will interact with
Working headline
Tags
Description
SEO Keywords
Related Content, Featured Media and Vector Search with AI Assistant
The AI Assistant is also powered by vector search capabilities that can surface and add related content automatically to the story. This will work in the following sections in Composer:
Related stories
Featured Media
When the AI Assistant is run, it will automatically add up to five related stories based off of relevance and 1 Basic featured media item. If either of these exist or are at the max threshold the AI Assistant will not replace human added content.
For example: Only customers leveraging the Advanced AI Package will have Related Items and Featured Media changes from the AI Assistant Available to them.
Style Guide Suggestions
The AI Assistant will also provide suggestions on the story body through Comments. Upon save, the AI Assistant will review the body against your style guide rules and provide:
Context for why a piece of text does not meet style guide standards
Suggestions a an author can accept or reject in applying changes
General spelling and grammar feedback
Customizing your Style Guide with AI Assistant
Style guide evaluation is based on a new prompt that occurs against the story body
This is a new prompt that can be customized to each customers specific needs
The AI Assistant comes with an OOTB prompt that evaluates generic standards but customers can provide their own instructions in the prompt
This is only interacting with text based elements in this phase.
Configuring the AI Assistant
The AI Assistant can be configured to either make direct changes or apply suggestions on Save. Admins can go to Global Settings > Arc Intelligence > AI Assistant to access a toggle to enable or disable Automatic Metadata changes
When on → the AI Assistant will make direct changes to metadata fields in the story.
When off → the AI Assistant will make suggestions that are only available in the AI Assistant sidebar for review.
Any suggested content does not persist after save or refresh.
How will the AI Assistant interact with a story?
The AI Assistant will be run on save and interact on stories in two different ways:
Automatically applied data
Suggestions that require a human to accept or reject
Note
Any feedback or changes left by the AI Assistant will be highlighted in the UI so authors can easily see where changes were made or feedback was given. None of the automatic changes will persist or change the story until the user saves explicitly. Suggestions that are not acted upon will not persist after save and would have to be run again in order to provide a new analysis.
Automatically applied data (when enabled)
These will only be run automatically if any of this data is not currently filled out or if it doesn’t meet standards that are defined in the prompts. We will not overwrite any human created data, only add to existing data. On save, the AI Assistant will evaluate the fields and if additions are needed it will show an indicator on the field being modified so the user can see that the AI is working on a particular area.
Working Headline
Tags
Description
SEO Keywords
Related Stories
Featured Media
These will only ever be automatically applied to a story when your organization has enabled automatic metadata changes in Global Settings/ Arc Intelligence / AI Assistant.
Suggestions with Human Review
When Automatic Metadata changes are off → the AI Assistant will make suggestions that are only available in the AI Assistant sidebar for review. This will apply for the same fields listed above for: Working headline, tags, description, SEO Keywords, Related Stories, and Featured Media.
Style guide suggestions will be placed as comments in the story body, none of the feedback the AI Assistant will change the story body until a user expressly takes action to accept or reject.
If a user does not act on suggestions provided and hits save, the suggestions will not be persisted. Any new style guide suggestions would be added the next time the AI Assistant analyzes the story.
How often will the AI Assistant run?
The AI Assistant can be triggered automatically on save but has a cooldown and content thresholds built in so we don’t needlessly make calls on content that hasn’t changed or subsequent saves in a short period of time.
For example: If an author has headlines, related items, and featured media filled out then the AI Assistant will not modify those fields. But if a customer set up in their Tags prompt that they always want to ensure there are 7 tags associated and the user only had 3, then the AI Assistant will add 4 more tags that the user can then review.
Our current thresholds for the AI Assistant to be run are as follows:
500 characters minimum in story
At least 10% change in story since last save
At least 200 characters changed
At least 3 seconds since last run
How can I customize what the AI Assistant evaluates?
The AI Assistant can be configured in 2 primary ways:
The prompts that it references for metadata and style guide checking review
AI Assistant Settings section in Global Settings.
Prompt Management: The AI Assistant will defer to the prompts that exist in Arc Intelligence and the fields that are enabled or disabled from Composer Settings.
Note
For example: If SEO keywords is not used in Composer, SEO keywords won’t be generated and if there are customizations to the Headlines prompt in Arc Intelligence Settings, the AI Assistance will refer to those instructions.
Arc Intelligence Settings in Global Settings: Admins can currently configure how the AI Assistant will run metadata suggestions. When "Enable automatic metadata changes" is toggled on the AI Assistant will automatically apply changes to the metadata. When Disabled, it will provide suggestions for users to review and approve or reject.
Note: We plan to expand AI Assistant Settings for further configurability, but it is currently limited to a single setting for automatically running metadata changes