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Sep 21

AI both risk and opportunity for journalism

By J.Lo

"More than 60% of respondents noted their concern about ethical implications of AI on journalistic values including accuracy, fairness and transparency and other aspects of journalism," researchers said in statement AI is both threat and an opportunity for journalism, with more than half of those surveyed for new report saying they had concerns about its ethical implications on their work.

While 85% of respondents had experimented with generative AI such as ChatGPT or Google Bard for tasks including writing summaries and generating headlines, 60% said they also had reservations.

Study , carried out by London School of Economic's Journalism AI initiative, surveyed over 100 news organizations from 46 countries about their use of AI and associated technologies between April and July.

"Journalism around the world is going through another period of exciting and scary technological change," stressed report co-author and project director Charlie Beckett.

He said study showed new generative AI tools were both "potential threat to integrity of information and news media" but also "incredible opportunity to make journalism more efficient, effective and trustworthy".

Journalists recognized time-saving benefits of AI with tasks such as interview transcription.

But they also noted need for AI generated content to be checked by human "to mitigate potential harms like bias and inaccuracy", authors said.

Challenges surrounding AI integration were "more pronounced for newsrooms in global south" they added.

"AI technologies developed have been predominantly available in English, but not in many Asian languages…we have to catch up doubly to create AI systems, and AI systems that work with our local languages," report quoted one respondent in Philippines as saying.

Co-author Mira Yaseen said economic and social benefits of AI were concentrated in global north and its harms disproportionately were affecting global south.

She said "exacerbating global inequality", adding that "power-conscious framing of global AI development and adoption was needed.