ISLAMABAD: Journalists had fun last year while asking the new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to write their news articles, most concluding that the chatbot was not good enough to take their jobs.
But several commentators believe journalism is on the verge of a revolution where mastery of algorithms and artificial intelligence tools that generate content will be a crucial battleground.
The technology news website CNET perhaps heralded the way forward when it deployed an AI tool to write some of its articles last year.
The site was later forced to issue many corrections after another news website noticed that the chatbot had made some serious mistakes.
But the parent company of CNET later announced job cuts that included editorial staff — though the management denied AI was behind the layoffs.
The German publishing giant Axel Springer, owner of German tabloid Bild and Politico, has been less coy among other titles.
“AI has the potential to practice independent journalism better than it was ever — or simply replace it,” the group’s head Mathias Doepfner told staff last month.
Hailing chatbots like ChatGPT as a “revolution” for the media industry, he announced a restructuring that would see “significant layoff” in production and proofreading.
Both organizations are pushing AI as a tool to help journalists and can point to recent developments in the industry.
Use of AI tools in journalism
For the past decade, media organizations have increasingly used automation for routine work, like reporting on company results or searching for patterns in economic data.
Organizations with an online presence have obsessed over “search engine optimization or SEO,” which involves using SEOs like keywords in a headline to get favoured by Facebook or Google algorithms and get a story seen by the most eyeballs.
And some have developed their algorithms to see which stories play best with their audiences, allowing them to better target content and advertising. The same tools turned Facebook and Google into global juggernauts.
An author of “Media Management and AI, Alex Connock,” says that mastering these artificial intelligence tools will help decide which media organizations survive and which fail in the coming years.
And the use of content creation AI tools will see some people lose their work, he said, but not in the fields of analytical and high-end reporting.
“In the particular case of the more mechanistic end of journalism — financial results, sports reports — I think that AI bots are replacing, and likely increasingly to replace human delivery,” he said.
French journalists Maurice de Rambuteau and Jean Rognetta are investigating how ready AI is to take over from journalists.
These journalists publish a newsletter called “Qant,” written and illustrated using artificial intelligence tools.
The authors found that they needed to constantly intervene to keep the process on track, so while the AI tools helped save some time, they were not yet ready to replace real journalists.
Journalists worldwide are “afflicted with the syndrome of the great technological replacement, but I do not believe in it,” Rognetta said.
