The Future of AI and How it will Affect Journalism

For more than half of a century, we have been relying on television for our daily dose of news and entertainment. However, things are fast changing. Now newsrooms are invaded by Artificial intelligence (AI). Xinhua News Agency’s first AI news anchor is hitting the lines.

This pops up number of questions like:

• What exactly AI will do?
• What will be the role of future journalists?
• Till what extent will the collaboration between human and AI will go?
• What do media businesses stand to gain and lose?

AI will be the next step in journalism and mass communication. Similar trend that we saw in other verticals such as,

• Social media
• Digital tools
• Online platforms
• Communication devices

AI in News Media

AI assisted journalism is the future of News Media. It will help the media companies in solving three major bottlenecks:

1. There is a constant flow of information. This bombardment of data make people more confuse. AI will help in avoiding information overload, by summarizing effectively. And avoiding duplication.
2. The credibility of journalism is falling. This is causing decrease in reliability. Thus, with machine learning, the credibility issues will be solved. Reaching to the source of a news item won’t be a difficult task.
3. AI will make an increasing and engaging business model for media owners. By weeding out the not so important stuff. And pruning the relevant information for individual and communities. It will surface accurate and useful information.

Challenges for AI in Journalism

Like in any other sectors, the machine learning technology can be misused. In journalism, it might lead to:

• Clickbait
• Fake news and disinformation
• Propaganda
• Trolling
• Malicious content

These are not alone. There are some implementation roadblocks too, for instance:

• Meaningful stories – programming narratives are not an easy task. Plus, storytelling is something that is inherent in humans. Coding them into machines will not surpass human imagination.

• Quality checks – AI can handle quantity efficiently. However, human editorial team would be required to check the quality parameters.

AI is transforming the workplace

Humans in collaboration with AI will create a new information ecosystem. Some of the remarkable applications would be:

• Organizing and presenting  - plenty of data  - in form of stories that are trending in

o   Vlogs

o    Blogs

o    Forums

o    Discussions

o    Events

o    Interviews

o    Chats

o    Social Media

• Instant response to breaking news, timely telecasting cross verticals
• Tracking well-timed after effects during climatic disaster or terror attacks
• Presentation autonomous bots for basic reporting like weather and reading script
• Filtering data in terms of cutting down duplication
• Machine learning verification technology can be gamed for,

o    Fact checking

o    Hate speech

o    News creating community fear and riots

• Editorial planning
• Marketing
• Data mining for investigative journalism
• 20% of all Google search is happening through voice. Voice platforms like Alexa/Google assistant will help citizen journalists in voicing out timely news from the ground level.

Artificial Intelligence’s impact on Journalism

AI, like in any other field, will surely influence the sector of journalism as well. Journalists need to understand AI much before it disrupts their workplace.

They need to have a thorough understanding of physical and organizational structures that facilitates the working of artificial intelligence.

They must be aware of datasets and information that goes into the systems. And the source of all these information.

Journalists need to understand that these datasets can be pulled together and compromised. That can easily manipulate the result of the system.

Does that mean journalists need to learn programming or python to be more specific?

Not at all, by having a solid understanding of AI infrastructure we mean, acquiring developers approach to solving problems.

By approaching with this attitude, it will become easier for journalists and other non-technical staff to understand how these systems are designed and built.

Their insight would further, help in framing modules that will assist in reporting news, articles and related content. Thus, resulting in a better understanding of how AI systems will gradually impact journalism.

Is AI a threat to Journalism?

Technological advancement always come with a threat and AI too has its negatives when it comes to journalism. Here are some of the disadvantages of AI assisted journalism:

• Automated journalism – the debate between instincts versus analysis is still on. At times, writing news reports involves instincts. And it’s difficult to code instincts into machines.
• No self awareness – the AI might send out signals of news items to sensitive areas during unwanted time thus creating chaos.
• Lack of authenticity
• Redefining copyrights
•  Accountability

However, the AI will have an upper hand, as it will surely support journalism in:

• Content gathering
• Content creation
• Moderation
• Scale
• Real time reporting using robotic cameras

One of the best examples is The Washington Post. It started using its own AI technology, Heliograf. It churn out nearly 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics.

New Tech Paradigm Around AI Assisted Journalism

Does mainstream journalism prepared to take human - machine collaboration face to face? It’s difficult to tell. Bigger media houses are ready but what about the smaller and conventional ones.  

There is need for new set of rules and regulations. It would be difficult to hold AI responsible for content creation and the sources. Issues like trust and transparency have to put in black and white tabs.

Developers gaining power at the expense of journalists or the public would not be justified. Neither will it fall into the progressive spirit of AI.

Case study: Human and AI assisted journalism

Let’s talk about a scenario of a media house that is powered by both human and AI. Human editors will determine the direction of the flow of the story. While AI will take care of the presentation of the content and possible outcome.

The flowchart would look something like this:

• Editors creating narrative templates
• Adding keywords resulting possible outcomes for instance “House Loans leading The Big Bubble Again” to “The College Debt Bubble is Becoming Dangerous”.
• Introducing AI with a structured form of data
• AI or the machine learning initiates the following process

• Identify related and relevant data
• Matches it with corresponding phrases that is present in template
• Merges them
• Finally, it publishes various stories across different segments

Take away:

The system can also come up with stories or tip that might be a potential scoop. For example, “Increase of Student Loan Debt Shows Decline in Economic Growth”.

Disrupted Journalism

AI will certainly bring changes to traditional journalism. The rise of the news bots is not aimed towards cutting down the role of human journalists. In fact, it will make newsrooms more resourceful.

With this structural approach, the media houses will offer variety to the local masses as,

1. AI will assist media houses in growing its audience by numbers
2. AI will target small and local audience with variety of niche topics

It will take over the scripts where human touch is not required like

• Reporting weather forecasts
• Synthesizing  like real-time election results and sports scores
• Reading scripts

The system will pull together the content while journalists’ job would be to write in discrete chunks. In this way, redundant and repetitive tasks would be taken care by the bots. Journalist would then be free to articulate better stories.