AI in journalism will cause ‘fundamental change in the news ecosystem’: expert
Artificial intelligence is shaking up journalism and in the short term will cause “a fundamental change in the news ecosystem,” media expert David Caswell told AFP.
A former employee at Yahoo! and BBC News Labs, the British broadcaster’s innovation wing, Caswell spoke as industry leaders gathered in the Italian city of Perugia to discuss the biggest questions facing their trade.
“We don’t know. But what we are trying to do is to understand all of the possibilities or as many of the possibilities as we can. But I think there are some things that are becoming clearer: one is the fact that more media will probably be created and originated and sourced by machines.
So machines will do more gathering in a lot of journalism, will do more of the producing, the audio, the video and the text, and will create the kind of experiences of consumption that consumers have.
That is a very fundamental change in the information ecosystem in general, and the news ecosystem in particular. This is structurally different than the one that we’re in now. We don’t know how long it’s going to take - it may be two, four, seven years. I think it’s going to be faster because there is very little friction.
People don’t need news devices, new hardware, they don’t need a lot of money as producers, they don’t need technical expertise. All those things that were barriers in the previous generation of AI are no longer barriers, thanks to generative AI.”
“One class of development is in new tools that enables AI workflow, for example JP Politikens in Denmark focused on making their existing products and activities more efficient. But it is also a basis for transitioning their products, their workforce, the activities into this new AI world.
There is a tool that Google has built -- the code name is ‘Genesis’ -- that they are testing with publishers. Some publishers are building their own. There will be platform versions of these tools.
These are tools, you bring your news gathering on the left side: your PDF, transcripts, audios, videos.. roughly. It helps you do things like analysis, summaries, turn into scripts, audios. They’re orchestrated by the tool.
What the journalist is doing is coordinating the tool, verifying the content all the way through to the end, and editing. The job becomes using the tool, like an editorial manager of this AI tool.
It technically works. But that’s a different thing than putting it in a newsroom in a large operation and use it day in day out, months in, months out. That’s a big question: is it going to be enthusiastically adopted, to be used in a way that isn’t very productive in the long run or will that enhance the productivity of newsroom dramatically?”
“In the last decade it was very expensive. It was very difficult: You need the data, you had to build a data warehouse, have an enterprise deal with Amazon or Google cloud, you had to hire data scientists, to have a team of data engineers. it was a major investment.