AI and News: What’s next?
Innovation in journalism is back. Following a peak of activity in the mid 2010’s, the idea of fundamentally reinventing how news might be produced and consumed had gradually become less fashionable, giving way to incrementalism, shallow rhetoric and in some cases even unapologetic ‘innovation exhaustion’. No longer. The public release of ChatGPT in late November of 2022 demonstrated capabilities with such obvious and profound potential impact for journalism that AI-driven innovation is now the urgent focus of the senior leadership teams in almost every newsroom. The entire news industry is asking itself ‘what’s next’? For many people in journalism the first half of 2023 was a time for asking questions and learning the basics of AI. What can ChatGPT actually do? What is generative AI? What is a language model? What is a ‘prompt’? How dependable are these tools? What kind of skills are required to use them? How fast is this technology improving? What are the risks? How much of all this is just hype? Many newsrooms went further, providing their employees and audiences with statements or guidelines describing how they intended to approach the use of generative AI in their workflows and news products. Some even began publishing a few experimental articles written by ChatGPT. Very few, however, have yet taken specific steps to pragmatically and routinely apply these technologies in their newsrooms. Change is in the air, but specific initiatives are harder to find.
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