A regional editorial director has hit back at suggestions that artificial intelligence is “taking work from photographers”.

National World editorial director Tim Robinson has addressed the claim, made to him over the company’s use of an AI tool to help illustrate some stories.

The publisher uses Adobe Firefly, which creates photo-realistic bespoke illustrations, to create images for which no relevant stock photograph is available.

In a piece for InPublishing, Tim, pictured, explained how National World has adopted and used the AI tool so far.

He wrote: “If you want a picture of a lady holding a fermented milk drink, walking her dog and carrying a selection of specific vegetables, you’d be hard pressed to find it in a stock library — but a bit of clever prompting in Firefly and… seconds later… here are four different options in high-def.

“A man looking at his phone being bombarded on all sides by gambling ads? An elderly gent wearing a suit made out of hot water bottles? No problem.

“And trust me, they are visually very, very engaging. No reader has ever complained.

“The only adverse reaction has come from a few fellow members of the journalism community when I posted some of our graphics pages on social media and they told me I was ‘taking work from photographers’. I’m not and they are completely missing the point.”

National World’s print teams also use Google Gemini to summarise in-depth reads down from 1,000 words to 40.

Tim added: “Our authors just paste it in and ask Gemini to pick out the salient points.

“Every day, we have a big read on pages 6-7 across all city editions — but if you don’t have time or the inclination to read it all, don’t turn the page, it’s chopped down for you.

“It may sound corny, but we call this summary ‘In a nutshell’ and it’s in the middle of each spread, literally contained in a graphic of a walnut shell.

“If you want to know readers’ big talking points in the city today, please take the time to enjoy our letters page – but you could just read the 50-word summary on page 2, again produced by Google Gemini.”