When it comes to AI and news, the first thing that comes to mind for most people is misinformation and disinformation aggravated by the use of AI. However, while AI-powered deepfakes, bot postings, and hallucinations are real things, AI is being put to more fundamental and practical use in making the business of journalism and news more effective and efficient.
How AI is Enhancing News Writing
One of the increasingly common ways that we’re seeing AI being used with journalism and news is with automated news writing. We know that AI systems, especially large language models, are really good at generating content in text, image, video, and audio form. While the use of AI in news creation goes back almost a decade, the more recent generative AI wave has resulted in a much greater use of AI tools to generate news articles on a variety of different topics, such as sports, financial reports, local politics, weather, or even late-breaking news.
AI systems are really good at taking large amounts of data, aggregating it, and then synthesizing well-crafted outputs in a variety of tones. There has been increasing use of these outputs to increase coverage of news topics that otherwise would not have much coverage due to lack of reporting staff and resources. For example, AI systems are covering local politics such as board of education meetings, high school and regional sports results, and narrative-form financial and weather reports.
The main hesitancy in using AI to generate these outputs is two-fold: the susceptibility of AI systems to hallucinate and get facts wrong, and the replacement of human journalist staff with automated machine systems. One of the ways to approach the concept of AI-generated news is to separate “low-effort” reporting of primarily data-driven facts, such as finance and sports from more nuanced, opinion or investigative reporting that requires journalistic skills. For the former, journalistic skills aren’t needed to simply report facts. However, for the latter, AI tools are not well suited to the more rigorous needs of deep-dive and longer form reporting.
So, the use of AI in journalism depends on the application. If you’re covering topics that require a human perspective, you need to keep the human in the loop. While for more fact-based reporting, the machine can do the work. But, even in that instance, the human can still be involved in the process of reviewing outputs to verify facts and editing outputs.
Likewise, AI can be used to assist with fact checking and verification even in instances where people are generating the outputs. While AI systems are prone to being mistaken about facts when asked to generate outputs, they are actually pretty good at providing additional oversight on outputs that can source information from other sources to determine if there’s a possibility for a fact to be misreported. AI systems can be used to flag potential misinformation and assist with providing methods to verify the claims that are made in articles.
Personalizing and Tailoring News Consumption
AI systems can also help optimize the experience for the news consumer. Content can be tailored or “hyperpersonalized” for each user. In which each news consumer can have highly personalized news feeds based on individual preferences. These outputs are then curated personalized news feeds that help identify topics that are of each user’s interests. This drives engagement and improves monetization when more eyeballs means more revenue.
Engagement with curated content is already in widespread use, even without the application of AI technology. However, AI adds greater sophistication by being able to read and categorize the content without requiring tagging or categorization that might not be as accurate. While many find this sort of curated content more engaging, others decry the increasing echo chambers of content that merely reinforce pre-existing concepts rather than broadening user experiences and interests. Hopefully we can find a balance in the way that information is presented to the user.
Enhancing the Operational Side of Journalism
Beyond news generation and consumption, AI is improving the business and operation of journalism, which is important given the high cost and low revenue usually associated with the news media industry. Journalism can be a resource-intensive business. Reporters need to gather data, travel to different locations to collect content and interviews, and then synthesize and generate outputs in a variety of formats. Websites have become a lot more interactive, and news consumers demand a multi-modal experience including text, images, interactive charts, audio, and video. These demands mean that it takes a lot of effort to produce engaging outputs. AI can provide significant help in all aspects of news development and production.
AI is particularly adept at processing and analyzing large datasets, and generating outputs in a variety of formats. These outputs can even be tailored to different preferences of consumers giving them a greater ability to engage with the content. AI-powered tools can digest this information, provide that advanced data analysis, and help provide some more understanding of what the story is.
Additionally, AI systems can also help with other aspects of newsroom operations from transcribing audio interviews and summarizing conversations to translating content into a wide range of languages. AI systems are also being used to automate, augment, and assist with routine tasks such as scheduling social media posts, managing content workflows, and even determining the best time to publish articles to get the maximum impact and engagement with an article. Using the recognition pattern of AI, these systems can automatically identify and tag images and videos, giving newsrooms the ability to manage large volumes of visual content. Many AI systems are also being called to help verify the authenticity of visual media. So, we’re using AI to figure out if content is AI generated or not.
While the business of news is always important as long as there’s something important to say, AI is helping in a wide range of ways to make journalism even more impactful and relevant than it has ever been.