Perugia, Italy:

Artificial intelligence is shaking up journalism and will lead to “fundamental changes in the news ecosystem” in the short term, media expert David Carswell told AFP.

Former employee of Yahoo! Carswell was speaking at the BBC News Lab, the BBC’s innovation arm, as industry leaders gathered in the Italian city of Perugia to discuss the biggest issues facing the industry.

How do you see the future of journalism? –

“We don’t know. But what we’re trying to do is understand all the possibilities or as many possibilities as possible. But I think some things are becoming clearer: One is the fact that more media machines will probably be driven by machines Create, originate and acquire, so machines will do more of the collection in many news areas, will do more of the production of audio, video and text, and will create the consumption experiences that consumers want.

This is a very fundamental change in the entire information ecosystem, especially the news ecosystem. This is structurally different than what we are in now. We don’t know how long this will take – it could be two years, four years, seven years. I think it will be faster because there is less friction.

People don’t need news equipment, new hardware, they don’t need a lot of money as a producer, they don’t need technical expertise. Thanks to generative AI, all the barriers in previous generations of AI are no longer barriers.”

What’s the latest going on in the newsroom?

“One type of development is new tools that support AI workflows, such as Denmark’s JP Poitikens, which focuses on making existing products and activities more efficient. But it is also fundamental to transforming its products, workforce, and activities into new tools. World of Artificial Intelligence .

Google has developed a tool – codenamed “Genesis” – that they are testing with publishers. Some publishers are building their own. There will be platform versions of these tools.

These are the tools you can put your news collection on the left side: your PDFs, transcripts, audios, videos… something like that. It can help you analyze, summarize, convert into scripts, audio and other things. They are carefully arranged by tools.

What journalists do is coordinate the tools, verify the content from start to finish, and then edit it. The job becomes using the tool, like an editorial manager for this AI tool.

Technically it works. But that’s different than putting it in a large newsroom and using it day after day, month after month. Here’s the big question: Will it be adopted with enthusiasm, used in a way that’s not efficient in the long run, or will it dramatically increase newsroom productivity? “

What’s the fare?

“In the last decade, it’s been very expensive. It’s very difficult: you need the data, you have to build a data warehouse, let the enterprise deal with Amazon or Google Cloud, you have to hire data scientists, have a team. It’s a major undertaking. Only organizations at the level of the BBC and the New York Times can truly afford investment.

This is not the case with generative AI. You can run news workflows through the interface for $20 per month. You don’t need to be a coder. All you need is motivation, enthusiasm and curiosity.

There are a lot of people in news organizations who wouldn’t have been involved with AI in the past because they didn’t have a technical background, and now they can use it. This is a more open form of AI: there’s a lot that smaller newsrooms can do, and there’s a lot that more junior people in more established newsrooms can do. I think that’s a good thing, but it’s also a damaging thing. Newsroom internal politics are often disrupted as a result.”

What stage of artificial intelligence are we at?

“Artificial intelligence has been around since the 1950s. But practical AI emerged with ChatGPT. It will be quite some time – a few years – before we really understand how to use them for valuable purposes. There are many things you can do with them.

The risk for journalism is that other organizations, startups, tech companies, will do things in journalism faster than journalism itself. Many startups have no editorial component at all. They are stealing content from news organizations, and some are covering niche markets: they are monitoring press releases, social media channels, PDFs in reports.”

What are the risks?

“Journalism has been underperforming over the last 10 or 15 years, and there’s no really solid vision for how this will play out in the social media world in the future. What AI does is it offers news organizations an opportunity to change that. Situation, participating in a new ecosystem, staying optimistic, participating, exploring, carrying out projects, experimenting, maybe it will change your mindset, which is positive.

As Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia Journalism School, said: “+AI is a force to be reckoned with, and journalism must organize itself around AI”. It won’t adapt to journalism.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)