The world’s biggest and most respected news organizations such as Reuters, AP, and the Washington Post have begun producing news stories generated by AI. A third of Bloomberg’s news output already uses some form of computer-generated reporting.
But despite the layoffs of journalists by both digital and traditional publishers, AI proponents agree that the real work of journalism, its creative and investigative aspects informed by human judgment, cannot be performed by automated technologies.
Jaclyn Peiser explored the world of the robot reporter in this article from The New York Times:
As the use of artificial intelligence has become a part of the industry’s toolbox, journalism executives say it is not a threat to human employees. Rather, the idea is to allow journalists to spend more time on substantive work.
“The work of journalism is creative, it’s about curiosity, it’s about storytelling, it’s about digging and holding governments accountable, it’s critical thinking, it’s judgment — and that is where we want our journalists spending their energy,” said Lisa Gibbs, the director of news partnerships for The A.P.
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A.I. in newsrooms may also go beyond the production of rote articles. “I hope we’ll see A.I. tools become a productivity tool in the practice of reporting and finding clues,” said Hilary Mason, the general manager for machine learning at Cloudera, a data management software company. “When you do data analysis, you can see anomalies and patterns using A.I. And a human journalist is the right person to understand and figure out.”
The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are experimenting with the technology to help with various tasks, including the transcription of interviews or helping journalists identify “deep fakes,” the convincingly fabricated images generated through A.I.
“Maybe a few years ago A.I. was this new shiny technology used by high tech companies, but now it’s actually becoming a necessity,” said Francesco Marconi, the head of research and development at The Journal. “I think a lot of the tools in journalism will soon by powered by artificial intelligence.”
