Evolving AI Journalism… Will reporters disappear?

January 3, 2023
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Insight

The technology of artificial intelligence (AI) has already entered deeply into the realm of journalism. It's not a ridiculous story, artificial intelligence robots are already writing articles. Research by CNBC reports that stock, sports, and weather articles written by AI have already been commercialized. The era where AI even checks the facts of articles is coming. Bloomberg News in the United States is creating about 25% of its articles by AI. The key is that AI searches through various data to find the facts that will be the subject of an article and deliver it to the reporter.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Journalism

A reporter's job is to write an article, and this is because artificial intelligence is getting closer and closer to being as good as human intelligence. It is said that the time taken by artificial intelligence to write a simple article takes less than one second on average.

It is a commonly held belief that artificial intelligence can write an article just as quickly as a human. Thus journalists around the world are finding creative ways to use AI to report on news material, organize information, discover unexpected connections, and distribute stories.

AI systems typically assist publishers in three areas:

  • Research: AI automates transcribing interviews, keeps track of current events, translates foreign news sources, collects pertinent posts on social media, and cross-references stored articles, documents and documents to gain fresh insights. It is used to do all of this.
  • Article writing: AI provides assistance with fact-checking and word choice, as well as monitoring local crime and educational levels and real estate prices, in order to customize stories for varied audiences.
  • Distribution: Using AI to automatically assess news reports and label them by content makes it easier for readers to locate articles with related topics.  As a result, AI technology simplifies tasks for news outlets, as well as offering rapid fact-checking.

Therefore, journalists are constantly mentioned as one of the jobs that will disappear due to the development of artificial intelligence. They predict that the vague claim that artificial intelligence robots will replace reporters comes from not properly understanding the work of reporters. A journalist’s job is largely divided into reporting and article writing. There are many reports of artificial intelligence robots being able to write articles by automatically generating a large amount of text based on simple facts. For example, a robot can gather raw data such as sports news or stock market data, and then automatically write sentences such as “Apple's products were sold well today” or “Ford Motor Company stock prices fell sharply” through the application of natural language generation technology.

The Potential Role of Artificial Intelligence in Assisting Journalists

In fact, the essence of a journalist's job is the area of coverage. Article writing is just a means to express what you covered. Reporting is an act that requires a lot of effort to meet people or sites. It would be impossible for artificial intelligence to replace humanity in the field of humanities, which requires human-to-human access. To put it simply, the article created by artificial intelligence is at the level of rearranging simple facts by using an article format. In other words, to be precise, artificial intelligence does not replace reporters, because it only replaces part of reporter work.

Reporters who are involved are also not afraid of artificial intelligence. Rather, they expect that artificial intelligence will write straight articles such as simple data articles as soon as possible. There is an expectation that if artificial intelligence replaces simple labor, there will be more time to cover the field and write quality articles. Rather than destroying jobs, artificial intelligence can save the essence of jobs.

It is said that if artificial intelligence handles simple incidents, straights, and breaking news articles, it will be much easier to work.

In this way, reporters are saying in unison that if artificial intelligence reporters appear, they will be able to work more ‘like a reporter’. This is because it is judged that no matter how advanced artificial intelligence is, it will not take away the coverage area, which is the essence of reporter work. Rather, it is pointed out that artificial intelligence should be wary of creating a sense of fear that artificial intelligence will replace humans.

The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

In an article in Forbes, Google says AI is intended to help reporters focus on stories requiring creative insight, analysis, and ethical judgment.

Artificial intelligence will never be able to replace human broadcasters because human broadcasters have the ability to make you feel. AI broadcasters have no empathy, they cannot interview anyone anymore, they cannot even question anyone, they can only read out the facts and figures without feeling any passion behind their words. They are emotionless and cold, like machines.

Leading into the future, AI broadcasters will be a tool for people to use to disseminate information. But this is not enough to support journalism's core values of freedom and democracy and human freedom. The real journalists are on the front lines of reporting, they need to report on the situation right now and listen to what everyone has to say. This gives them a greater understanding of what is really going on in a situation that leads to greater truth.

Just because you have AI does not mean you have journalism. The future of news is about reporting through people, it is about having the ability to feel and to understand things from different perspectives. The future of news is not about having an AI that can just read out the facts and figures from an algorithm.

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