“Artificial intelligence will also be a threat to the journalism business”

The technocapitalist fever for artificial intelligence (AI) is already affected many sectors and the journalism is no stranger to it. This will be the starting point of a debate day organized by the Catalan Association of Diaris Editors and the Faculty of Business and Communication of the UVic, which this Friday will bring together in Barcelona the management of several Catalan media, including THE NEWSPAPER, already experts in the profession. To better understand what impact the tools of Generative AI among reporters, we have spoken with Charlie Beckettprofessor in the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science and director of Polis, a research center on journalistic innovation.

Newsrooms have been using AI for years. What has generative AI been used for and what changes can it bring?

It has been used to do repetitive and mentally simple tasks at large scale and speed. It can be used to automate news gathering, headline writing, and distribution. The possibilities have increased a lot.

This week they caught Sports Illustrated publishing AI-generated news by fake authors. How should we implement AI?

That case was not the fault of technology, but of human editors who lied to their readers by pretending that a human had written them. Generative AI will be part of everything and will be really useful for journalists to be more efficient. It is foolish to think that they will replace journalistic experience. As we become more familiar with it, we will understand its limitations and that it is sometimes inaccurate. Every month it gets better and in two years it will be different again.

Can you help the media overcome its serious financial crisis?

I think it helps. Anything that makes journalism more efficient is welcome. In some ways, it will also be a challenge. If you can use ChatGPT, why would you go to journalism? If you want to find information, you can ask a generative AI. In that sense, AI will mean greater competition for journalists. Many large language models provide answers to users, but do not link to media web pages. So it will also be a threat to the newspaper business.

He Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism warns that “it will be more difficult than ever to separate what is real from what is false, misleading or manipulated.” Will AI be another layer of online misinformation?

Yes, it makes it much easier to create misinformation and harder to detect. However, misinformation is already there, so I don’t know if its impact will change. People decide to create hoaxes and spread them, so if you want to counteract that you have to address their causes. Focusing only on the technology they use for it can be a distraction.

AI is already being used with political and propaganda messagesfor example in the war in Ukraine and in Gaza.

Yes, but I don’t think it’s anything particularly new. Before the Internet, the media were already used for propaganda and with social networks that was enhanced. But, at the end of the day, it is a human thing. Furthermore, there is evidence that the effect of propaganda is limited, especially in Western democracies. I think AI can also be used to counter it.

The AI suffers ‘hallucinations’ and can present something invented as if it were true. Various experts they point because its massive use can poison what appears in search engines. Will the degradation of the information ecosystem reinforce the importance of those media and journalists who know how to gain the trust of readers?

Of course, but first we need to be realistic about journalism. Many journalists spread disinformation, make propaganda and are biased. They can even spread hate messages deliberately or accidentally by not verifying what they say. So we should not be arrogant about doing journalism. But there is certainly an opportunity: people want reliable information and the pandemic made that clear. Sometimes they look for partisan information, but they also need independent, serious, sensible and verified thinking.

The economic logic of digital has prioritized content that appeals to our emotions because they retain us longer. In their desperate search for reader attention, many media outlets have succumbed to inflammatory approaches. Could the rise of AI accentuate partisanship and give more prominence to opinion in the media?

In the last 10 or 15 years we have seen that journalistic brands have followed the trend of being more personal and ideologically aligned with their readers. Something similar has happened with politics, which is no longer so much about class and has begun to give more importance to personal feelings and values.

Another key issue is how the media reports on AI. The technology giants are promoting a exaggerated story that benefits their business interests and they do it with eye-catching advertisements that capture the attention of the majority of the media.

There are people in Silicon Valley who really believe that AI could exterminate humanity and it’s fair to report that, but I agree with you. It is a distraction from real problems such as racial discrimination, privacy or surveillance. It can also be used in incredible ways as medical research shows, but there has to be much more information about everything that is happening. We spend too much time writing about robots and whether they will be a threat to humans. And those stories are not dealt with adequately, logically and politically.

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In Catalonia, a report regrets that excessive prominence is given to business sources, while critical voices are limited. Do you share that concern?

I think so, it’s been a concern for decades. Even before the Internet, a report was published in the United Kingdom that demonstrated the laziness of newsrooms that recycled press releases without questioning them. The increase in investment by companies has to do with the importance of the media. Now, corporations are taking advantage of the crisis in the journalism business and are filling the space with their sponsored content. AI may be able to help you manage the overwhelming volume of emails you receive and transcribe this interview, but it won’t help cure that problem in the bud. The hope is that they will help journalists become more critical and independent.