AI is the new horizon for news – Global Editors Network – Medium

AI is the new horizon for news
Towards the Augmented Newsroom
In January 1818, Mary Shelley published the first edition of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Her work became the template for all modern science-fiction work.
A century later, in January 2018, we still have young and promising scientists as Victor Frankenstein and we still have ‘creatures’ generated by human intelligence, but today Shelley would instead call them artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice AI, and big data.
Boris Karloff, director James Whale, and cinematographer John J. Mescall on set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — Public domain
The first difference with Shelley’s novel is that there is not only one ‘creature’, but millions of creatures that we have to live with and among them. The second difference is that Shelley’s creature kills itself at the end of the story, and we cannot expect that from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Baidu, Toutiao, and Tencent.
These global tech companies are the post-modern Prometheus, but how can we to distinguish the myth, the fantasy, and the reality behind these two words, artificial intelligence? What are the implications for news media and journalists?
One myth is that more machines and algorithms will mean less jobs in the newsrooms. On the contrary: Innovation transforms jobs and skills by creating new services and products, which in turn leads to more employment opportunities.
Frame-breakers, or Luddites, smashing a loom in 1812 — Engraving from the Penny magazine, 1844 — Public domain
The 19th century Luddites were English workers who destroyed manufacturing machinery, hoping that it would save their jobs. Journalists and editors cannot afford to be this century’s Luddites. Stopping the development of new technologies is not the solution. Nevertheless, the questions asked by the likes of Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk about humanity’s place in the future, alongside computers and algorithms, are 100 percent valid. We cannot be naive or careless.
This is why we decided at the Global Editors Network to focus the GEN Summit 2018 (in Lisbon from 30 May — 1 June) on AI and its byproducts: voice AI, news bots, robo-writing software, in addition to the intersections of AI with blockchain and data journalism.
I believe AI will be the catalyst of the third disruption in journalism.Twenty-five years ago, the first disruption was the widespread availability of the Internet and the free access to information. The second one was the rise of the smartphone, which meant a single device with one small screen for news, services, entertainment, and social networks. This third disruption will have the same amplitude as the first two and will potentially change the way we produce and consume news.
Three shifts in less than one generation is no small burden for newsrooms. We understand that it’s exhausting to many journalists and editors, but there is no way to avoid it: It’s time to think about the ‘augmented newsroom’, the new space — virtual and real — where journalists will have to combine machine-written news with in-depth reporting; photojournalism with surveillance camera images; professional videos with user-generated posts.
Here are some things to prepare for the shift from a digital newsroom to a genuine ‘augmented newsroom’:
1 — Be prepared for this 4.0 newsroom with AI-powered videos, voice AI, and automated translation systems. Text, audio, and video are no longer just different mediums of content; they are now mediums that can intersect and overlap thanks to text-to-video or speech-to-text technologies – any article can become a video (and vice-versa) and any audio or video report can be transformed into a text piece.
AI is giving the gift of ubiquity to news; it is a revolution that can be easily understood through three examples.
AI is giving the gift of ubiquity to news; it is a revolution that can be easily understood through three examples. The first one is the shift to video, a major trend when you look at figures provided by platforms, particularly YouTube and Facebook. News will not be an ivory tower that’s separate from this trend: Legacy media will have to follow the users’ habits for more visual journalism. Nevertheless, even if video teams are growing in the majority of newsrooms, it will not be enough to satisfy the current video crunch. Nobody believes that ‘text is dead’, but there is a huge development potential for companies such as Wibbitz or Wochit in transforming text — without any human intervention — into video segments incorporating voice, images, and video.
The second example is voice AI through virtual (or personal) assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. At the moment, interaction is very limited: you can ask for the latest news but it is very difficult to get more in-depth information. In a few years, however, we can expect that voice search will be as sophisticated as the classical search engine: your voice will replace your fingers and voice AI will become an endless source of news — and revenues.
An Amazon Echot Dot smart speaker
The third development of AI will happen when automated translation will allow a Norwegian reader of Aftenposten to read articles in El País and La Vanguardia on the Catalonian elections in the reader’s native language.
2 — The future of automated journalism will not be limited to sports, economic, or election coverage as it is today at the Associated Press, Reuters, Guardian, or Le Monde. Robot-writing software today depends on databases of pre-registered texts and a limited number of sentences, but this format will probably be considered media archeology in a few years. Machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language generation will produce more sophisticated text. It will become very difficult to distinguish a story written by a journalist from a story produced by a machine. Take the example of an obituary. A human author will be rather personal, but the machine will produce a more detailed biography with more photos, quotes, and comments updated in real time, or even an interactive story based on dates, locations, and topics.
Another example are interviews. Today, journalists are preparing their own questions through search engines, video platforms, and digital archives. Tomorrow, they will rely on a robot for finding more in-depth questions linked to the very latest news. Additionally, the same journalist who can today manage one major interview per day will have the possibility to write two or three if they work with an automated transcription service .
Vincent Fournier, Reem B #5 [Pal], Barcelona, Spain, from: The Man Machine, 2010 © Vincent Fournier
3 — AI will improve engagement when combined with UGC and crowdsourcing. Basically, you need a database for producing AI-based narratives. And there are three possibilities for getting a database: produced by your journalists or analysts, bought from a third party, or generated by your users. This third possibility is the most promising. Your users will provide content not in an anarchic way but through a frame defined by the software and remotely curated by a journalist. Not any user will become a content provider, but individuals committed to their community or their activity will be the first targets. It is the role of media organisations to gather those doers and makers, even if the turnover will be important. Limiting them to fill forms and templates will be also an issue after a certain period.
4 — AI will allow newsrooms to cover new topics and beats. A newsroom is logically limited by its number of content producers. Some media organisations are more productive than others, but generally, there is a ratio of the number of journalists to the quantity of content produced. With AI, you can get a meta-newsroom that produces a lot of content with a limited number of curators. This will allow newsrooms to broaden coverage on hyperlocal issues like community sports, local union activity, or citizen initiatives.
Different opinions about AI from tech leaders (click to zoom) — Taken from Vanity Fair
5 — AI is not a ‘black box’. Journalists must ask for more accountability and transparency. As algorithms are increasingly shaping content production, it is apparent that they are new power structures that warrant more scrutiny. Journalists must analyse an algorithm’s biases to better hold their creators accountable for the power they exert. For instance, one notable bias of algorithms is that they reproduce stereotypes about gender, race, and poverty. Recently, at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34CCC) in Leipzig, Katharine Jarmul, founder of data analysis company kjamistan, presented the latest trends of adversarial machine learning and showed how people can modify their own photos or videos in order to avoid face recognition by Facebook or Google, or even forms of mass surveillance.
Another issue to solve is transparency: is it important to know if an article is produced by a robot or a human? Will we in a couple of years have to add a disclaimer at the end of some stories that they are ‘machine-written’? This debate is important for the journalists (the production side) as much as it is important for the readers (the consumption side).
Blockchain is not AI. The former is decentralized and the latter is hyper-centralized. However, media organisations must understand that both will have a similar impact in the coming years because both are consumer-centric and quite new for the news industry.
While the media industry as a whole is still warming up to Blockchain, some companies like Hubii and Civil are trying to solve the basic issues of news personalisation, monetization, misinformation, and fact-checking using blockchain.
‘Journalism will be one of the first, truly consumer-facing applications of blockchain technology’, said Daniel Sieberg, founder of Civil.
I also agree with David Schlesinger, an advisor at Hubii, who said that ‘blockchain, by disintermediating gatekeeper companies, can put control in the hand of makers and users’. Blockchain can potentially allow content creators to earn more, distributors to pay less, and consumers to have more choices. In another words, blockchain will help us set up a new content marketplace.
Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017
In conclusion, I want to highlight five ideas:
AI is giving the gift of ubiquity to news: any article can become a video and vice-versa, any audio or video report can become text;
Automated journalism will affect all of a newsroom’s departments. It will not be limited to sports, economic, or election coverage;
AI will improve engagement when combined with UGC and crowdsourcing. Don’t believe that some users will be AI defiant;
AI will allow to set up a meta-newsroom that produces a lot of content with a limited number of curators; and
Algorithmic accountability and transparency will be essential for the development of AI within the journalistic community.
All those ideas will be discussed in Lisbon at the 8th GEN Summit and I hope to see you there. Very Happy New Year to all of you.
Bertrand Pecquerie , Chief Executive Officer, the Global Editors Network