Unveiling AI's Newsroom Role: Efficiency Boosts and Misinformation Hazards
Recent research highlights the widespread adoption of AI tools in newsrooms for various tasks, driven by a need for efficiency amid financial pressures. While AI offers benefits, it also introduces risks of misinformation, emphasizing the importance of careful integration and broader industry engagement.
In a previous article, we looked at a worldwide survey on the penetration of AI in the newsroom, finding out that many organizations already use AI tools for several scopes. Another research found that "75% of the respondents declared that they use various AI-based applications for newsgathering and 90% for news production". We can dig more into how AI has entered newsrooms or the working process of single individuals.
For example, we can rely on individual experiences shared by journalists. Caitlin Dewey, an American writer and essayist, has recently published an opinion on the website Poynter, where she goes through 11 different pieces of work she uses ChatGPT for. She is aware of the risk of hallucinations (i.e. the possibility of false or misleading information contained in the result of a tack performed by an AI bot). Still, at the same time, she finds it helpful to free her time for the most trivial tasks, such as putting events in chronological order, summarizing long texts or organizing her schedule most effectively.
Felix M. Simon, a communication researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and Balliol College at the University of Oxford, draws the same conclusion. He recently published a report, Artificial Intelligence in the News. How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena, based on 134 interviews with news workers at 35 news organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and 36 international experts. In the first chapter, the author looked at how AI is currently being used to produce and distribute news. He found that AI is applied to many different tasks in various production process steps. But, contrary to the general assumptions, "many of the most beneficial applications of AI in news are relatively mundane, and AI has often not proved to be a silver bullet in many cases". As Dewey wrote (but from a personal point of view), AI tools are mainly used for menial tasks.
So why is a news organization interested in adopting AI tools? Is it only a matter of cost savings? According to Simon's research, news organizations feel pressured to adopt AI tools because of the industry's financial challenges. Thus, in a way, cost cuts are an element in this discussion.
Another motivator is "AI's potential to increase efficiency in news organizations", writes Simon: "Various examples demonstrate that efficiency and productivity gains have been achieved, including dynamic paywalls, automated transcription, and data analysis tools in news production". This point echoes an interview by A. G. Sulzberger, the New York Times publisher, to the Reuters Institute. In the interview, he concentrates on how to preserve the paper and industry values. But he affirms that much innovation, from different points of view, is needed in the industry itself to ensure its future. There could be a lengthy discussion on the opportunity to talk about journalism from the industrial point of view, something that many journalists in different countries struggle to accept or consider. The main point we can draw from the ENJOI perspective is that innovation can apply not only to how news is reported but also - and maybe predominantly - to the industrial process. That is why the public discussion should include more and more publishers and other figures in the industry.
If you want to know more, download the Artificial Intelligence in the News report
