Academic Excellence: Easy to Say, Tough to Deliver It Seems
February 21, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
A recent report from Columbia Journalism Review examines “Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena.” Many words from admirals watching the Titanic steam toward the iceberg. The executive summary explains:
“Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers at 35 news organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany — including outlets such as The Guardian, Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Washington Post, The Sun, and the Financial Times — and 36 international experts from industry, academia, technology, and policy, this report examines the use of AI across editorial, commercial, and technological domains with an eye to the structural implications of AI in news organizations for the public arena. In a second step, it considers how a retooling of the news through AI stands to reinforce news organizations’ existing dependency on the technology sector and the implications of this.”
The first chapter examines how AI is changing news production and distribution. It is divided into three parts: news organizations’ motives for using AI, how they are doing so, and what expectations they have for the technology. Chapter two examines why news organizations now rely on tech companies and what this could mean for the future of news. Here’s a guess: Will any criticism of big tech firms soon fail to see the light of day, perhaps?
See the report (or download the PDF) for all the details. After analyzing the data, author Felix M. Simon hesitates to draw any firm conclusions about the future of AI and news organizations—there are too many factors in flux. For now, the technology is mostly being used to refine existing news practices rather than to transform them altogether. But that could soon change. If it does, public discourse as a whole will shift, too. Simon notes:
“As news organizations get reshaped by AI, so too will the public arena that is so vital to democracy and for which news organizations play a gatekeeper role. Depending on how it is used, AI has the potential to structurally strengthen news organizations’ position as gatekeepers to an information environment that provides ‘people with relatively accurate, accessible, diverse, relevant, and timely independently produced information about public affairs’ which they can use to make decisions about their lives. … This, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Instead, it will depend on decisions made by the set of actors who wield control over the conditions of news work — executives, managers, and journalists, but also increasingly technology companies, regulatory bodies, and the public.”
That is a lot of players. Which ones hold the most power in this equation? Hint: it is not the last entry in the list.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2024
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