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Generating Change in Journalism

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WorkDifferentWithAI.com Academic Paper Alert!

Written by Charlie Beckett, Mira Yaseen

Article Section: Content Workflow and Management Applications

Publication Date: Dec 6, 2023

SEO Description: Exploring AI’s transformative role in newsrooms: content automation, data analytics, and personalized reporting.

Beckett, Charlie, and Mira Yaseen. Generating Change.

Keywords

AI in journalism, content automation, personalized news, investigative reporting tools, media data analytics

AI-Generated Paper Summary

Generated by Ethical AI Researcher GPT

This whitepaper, entitled “Generating Change: A global survey of what news organizations are doing with AI,” has been funded by the Google News Initiative and carried out by a team led by Professor Charlie Beckett, who is the director of the LSE’s international journalism think-tank Polis. The lead researcher and co-author of this paper is Mira Yaseen. Their work seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of how AI is currently being employed within news organizations globally, delineating the particular functions AI performs in the domains of content production, distribution, and audience engagement, as well as the broader objectives that drive media entities to adopt these technologies.

The paper details a variety of use cases where AI is making significant inroads in journalistic processes. For instance, AI is assisting with complex tasks such as natural language processing (NLP) applications for fact-checking claims and generating summaries, headlines, visuals, and audio for news articles. AI is also employed in news distribution, with roughly 80% of survey respondents indicating their use of AI in this domain to boost audience reach and engagement. The paper presents specific examples of AI applications like BloombergGPT, The Washington Post’s Heliograf, and The Times of London’s JAMES, among others, each indicative of the diversity of AI’s deployment in media and tailored to various operational needs, such as automating news production, personalizing content, and supporting investigative reporting.

Author Caliber: The paper is developed under the direction of Professor Charlie Beckett, who has credible expertise in journalism, being associated with the London School of Economics’ Polis think-tank. The Google News Initiative’s funding further supports the collaboration of industry and academic expertise. Mira Yaseen, as lead researcher and co-author, contributes to the academic rigor of the work, although her specific background isn’t detailed in the provided information.

Novelty & Merit:

  1. The encyclopedic survey of AI’s application across global news organizations, highlighting a diverse range of functions AI serves within the journalism sector.
  2. Direct insights from media practitioners and technologists, providing qualitative data on the effectiveness and strategic importance of AI.
  3. A discussion of various state-of-the-art AI systems and tools currently being employed, providing concrete industry case studies.
  4. An evaluation of AI’s impact on journalism, including both operational efficiencies and challenges faced by news organizations in integrating these technologies.

Commercial Applications:

  1. Development and refinement of content creation and management tools, particularly for automated news production and personalized content delivery.
  2. Leveraging AI for enhanced content distribution strategies through personalization and recommendation engines.
  3. Tools for improving editorial processes, including proofreading, fact-checking, and analysis of massive datasets to aid investigative journalism.
  4. Offering insights into market trends and aiding in the development of AI products and services that cater to the news industry’s evolving needs.

Findings and Conclusions:

  1. AI is broadly used across content production, distribution, and audience engagement, enhancing operational efficiency and the personalization of content.
  2. There is a wide spectrum of successful implementations of AI, including language models, content management systems, and automated article generation from structured data.
  3. The majority of media companies view AI as a means to increase efficiency and productivity, aiming to allocate human journalists to more creative and analytical tasks.
  4. Despite the success of AI applications, continuous testing and human oversight remain critical, reflecting both the evolving nature of AI technology and the unique challenges the news industry faces in integrating it.

Author’s Abstract

Our news media world has been turned upside down again. As always, serious technological change produces both dystopian and utopian hype. Much of this has been generated on social media by corporate PR and politicians. News coverage and expert commentary has also veered from excited coverage of positive breakthroughs in fields such as medicine to much more frightening visions of negative forces unleashed: Generative AI (genAI) is producing a tidal wave of automated, undetectable disinformation; it will amplify discrimination, extreme speech and inequalities.

And its impact on journalism? Again, much of the coverage has focused on the unreliability of many genAI tools and the controversy over its rapacious appetite for other people’s data to train its algorithms. As the initial storm of hype turns into more practical considerations we have been talking to news organisations around the world about this new wave of technological change. What are they doing with AI and genAI; what might they do in the future; and what are their hopes and fears for its impact on the sustainability and quality of this hard-pressed journalism industry?

Whether you are excited or appalled at what genAI can do, this report makes it clear that it is vital to learn and engage with this technology. It will change the world we report upon. It needs critical attention from independent but informed journalists. But our survey shows it is also already changing journalism. It brings exciting opportunities for efficiency and even creativity. As one respondent told us, “Freeing up time for journalists to continue doing their job is the greatest impact achieved.”

But it also brings specific and general hazards. The good news from our respondents, at least, is that they are aware of the opportunities and risks and are beginning to address them. The best organisations have set up structures to investigate genAI and processes to include all their staff in its adoption. They have written new guidelines and started to experiment with caution.

This is a critical phase (again!) for news media around the world. Journalists have never been under so much pressure economically, politically and personally. GenAI will not solve those problems and it might well add some, too.

Responsible, effective journalism is more needed than ever. We hope this report and our work at JournalismAI contributes to that mission. We look forward to hearing from you. Let us know what you are doing and how we can help.

Professor Charlie Beckett
Director Polis, LSE, leader of the LSE’s JournalismAI project

Read the full paper here

Last updated on December 11th, 2023.