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AI AND THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
A valuable tool
that can become
a lethal weapon
Self-learning robots have the ability to surpass the human brain, but nobody, not even its creators, know how they reason. The dangers of misinformation and the Trojan horse that could kill small media outlets. Why the profession of journalism will be more relevant than ever.
By Martin Mazur
AIPS Media
When I asked Dall-E3, the image creator powered by OpenAI, what a newsroom could look like if AI had fully taken over and human journalism had become obsolete, the images it prompted were frightening: A nearly abandoned and dusty office, old PCs piled up, newspapers scattered on the floor and tall columns of wires from supercomputers dominating the scene. The aesthetics resembled the post-apoca- lypse photos of Chernobyl. But is AI the big danger in journalism or can it be a solution? The only way to stay away from perceptions and fears is through facts.
In 2014, Professor Stephen Hawking had predicted that AI “would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever in- creasing rate” until endangering the hu- man race. There are many pundits today that are thinking that AI can effectively destroy mankind.
One of them is the so-called “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, who last year quit Google and warned over dangers of misinformation. His immediate concern, among others, is that the internet will have so many fake photos, videos and text, that most people won’t know what’s true anymore. This could be good for the resurrection of real journalism, a credible source in the darkness, one can also think. But in the meantime, AI is also capable of doing some immediate damage to jour- nalism, there’s no doubt about that.
In the TV show Last Week Tonight, John
Oliver presented a compilation of jour- nalists (CNN, CBS, NBC and WSVN) that used ChatGPT to write their own lines, in a way to give a shocking twist to their reports. The chatbot, indeed, was getting so much better that you could not tell the difference. One of them even cracked a joke written by it.
It doesn’t sound as a good idea to explicit- ly show the technology that will make you obsolete, does it? Not when hundreds of thousands of jobs are easily at risk around the world. The problem, so far, is reputa- tion. (And money, too).
MADE-UP JOURNALISTS To have AI in the newsrooms seems kind of a Trojan horse. Appealing and interesting. Mod- ern. Fashionable. Everyone wants a piece of it. It has a positive effect. It’s trendy. But what happens next?
In November 2023, Sports Illustrated had to delete several web articles generated by artificial intelligence and published under fake author names. The report, coming from tech publisher Futurism, uncovered how Sports Illustrated had made author headshots on an AI-generated image app. Arena Group, which owns Sports Illus- trated, claimed they had licensed the con- tent from a third-party company, Advon Commerce. The Sports Illustrated Union said “these practices violate everything we believe in about journalism. We demand the company commit to adhering to basic journalistic standards, including not pub- lishing computer-written stories by fake people.”
Sports Illustrated has made large cuts to
COVER STORY
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