The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Newsrooms
The concept of artificial intelligence is not new, but its execution has recently reached new levels that greatly enhance and develop its capabilities and uses. In fact, a lot of artificial intelligence has been integrated into our daily lives with our barely noticing: Siri, Alexa, and a few more familiar names have comfortably inserted themselves into daily life.
Journalism is always looking for ways to update its resources and learn with new technologies. Newsrooms both large and small have shown an interest in acquiring artificial intelligence to supplement their research. In 2019, Polis, the London School of Economics’ media think tank, and the Google News Initiative partnered to create the JournalismAI initiative–a fellowship program that also encourages the use of AI among journalists.
“What we can do for them, through the fellowship, is connect them with a global network of people at the same level,” said Mattia Perett, initiative manager and team leader. “By getting them to collaborate with each other, we can help them accelerate the adoption and implementation of AI, and show everyone in our community what's possible.”
So what exactly is possible?
One of the major pitfalls of AI is that it is, as humans are, capable of developing racial and gender biases, as well as racial profiles and stereotypes. In order to counteract that, it takes a diverse pool of people, argues fellowship program manager Lakshmi Sivadas. “Our idea was that if we bring in people who are representative of major populations around the world, they could recognize the kind of biases that exist in current data sets,” said Sivadas. “Then, in the systems that they are building or developing right now with the fellowship, they would be able to figure out where bias enters the development process, and mitigate that as well.”
But just as much as journalists can help AI, AI can also help journalists. Newsgathering AI can interpret data points for journalists, which will help them identify trends. It will also help journalists track who is reporting on what event and which words or phrases that come up in relation, often, to the issue. The AI can catalog and cite these sources instantly. News production AIs can actually write or reformat content, also almost instantly (AI production bots have made the news before). Distribution AIs can automatically take feedback and incorporate it in order to reach new audiences. Distribution AIs can also tailor the news flow to and from an individual so that person sees the news they are most interested in.
Overall, any process can be automated by AI in journalism and can make the work much easier on the journalist, says Peretti. “There is not one single journalism student that decided to take this career path because they were dying to sift through PDF documents day after day…That's something machine learning does very well, and I think we should be excited that we can have the support of software doing all these things for us.”
All AI involved with the JournalismAI Initiative are designed to be run only with human supervision for the time being, as Peretti believes unsupervised running of the AI could prove “extremely dangerous.”
“The word we use again and again is ‘responsible’,” said Peretti. “I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing in the industry and I want to presume that a little bit of that is due to the work we do. But we need to continue to stress [responsible use of AI] if we really want AI to be a force of good for journalism.”
Soon, AI will likely be in the majority of newsrooms, and conversations around using it ethically and responsibly will be taking place. AI still has a long way to go in terms of development as a technology, and surely journalism will evolve alongside any and all technological developments in the meantime.
