Nico Drok, Vice Chair of the World Journalism Education Council (WJEC) and emeritus professor of Media & Civil Society, has dedicated over 40 years to journalism education. The following address was delivered at the VII International Journalism Forum, hosted by Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in April 2024.
Ladies and gentlemen,
In 1922, the American sociologist William Ogburn formulated the Cultural Lag Theory. It says that technological developments often become autonomous because they develop more rapidly than the surrounding culture, especially when there are also financial interests involved.
Today, 100 years later, Ogburn is still very relevant. In our days, the techno-economic sphere seems to colonize others spheres of society. This is not always bad. New technology can offer new solutions, for instance in the medical sphere. But it should always be developed hand in hand with cultural considerations of an ethical, social and legal nature.
The title of my speech of today is: “Journalism and AI; Opportunities and Threats”. Artificial Intelligence can be defined as: “systems that are capable of learning to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence”.
One could say that AI arrives at a good moment in history. We live in a world of information overload. Big data journalism, based on the filtering and analysis of large sets of data, is gaining importance. AI is becoming a necessary tool for journalism, especially for investigative journalism.
AI is becoming a necessary tool for journalism, especially for investigative journalism.
But AI can also be useful in many other ways. It can take over routine jobs. It can make summaries of speeches or articles. It can write articles on the basis of press releases, while adding relevant information. At a press conference, it can make live transcriptions, live translations, live subtitles.
AI can be on top of the news, by following social media and specialised websites. It can create text, photos, video, audio, very effectively and efficiently, saving a lot of time and money.
For journalism, AI does not only have a skills side. It also has a knowledge side. Artificial Intelligence will have a huge impact on our societies. It will probably play a role in every sector, from health care to warfare, and from education to economy.
Future journalists must have a deep insight and understanding of AI, so they can inform the public about the choices society has to make. The UNESCO Handbook for journalism educators is called: “Reporting on Artificial Intelligence” .
Future journalists must have a deep insight and understanding of AI, so they can inform the public about the choices society has to make. The UNESCO Handbook for journalism educators is called: “Reporting on Artificial Intelligence“
That is a wise title. The Handbook considers AI not primarily as a tool for journalists, but as an important societal issue they have to cover. Maarit Jaakkola, who edited this handbook, is one of the speakers today.
It is clear that AI offers many opportunities. But there are also problems and threats, of course. Every new technology has two faces and can be used for good or for bad.
The first problem is that AI can make mistakes and publish wrong information. There are many examples of that.
The second problem is that this wrong information can be published intentionally: AI can be used to produce disinformation. This can increase the quantity of disinformation to an unknown level.
Next to that, the use of AI can make it much more difficult for the public to recognize disinformation, for instance through deep fakes.
Disinformation is a huge and direct threat to the functioning of modern society. AI can magnify this problem many times – both in quantity and in quality.
The third problem is that the use of AI can easily contribute to an increasing violation of privacy. In the world of Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta or Microsoft, consumers pay for many services through their personal data.
AI can produce very precise profiles of who we are. These personal profiles can be sold to commercial parties, who can offer consumers very narrow targeted suggestions about what to buy, what to watch, what to read, what to believe.
Apart from the commercial use, personal profiles can be used by governments that want to influence their citizens. AI can also be used as a powerful tool for monitoring citizens, for instance through facial recognition. AI can do the filtering and analysis of the billions of bytes that these state control systems deliver.
In journalism, AI applications such as ChatGPT are becoming popular. These applications often use social media as their main source. The use of open sources has the advantage that copyright or privacy are not easily violated.
But it also has risks. In journalism, the quality of the final publication highly depends on the quality of the sources that were used. The quality of the ingredients determines the quality of the meal. Unfortunately, much of the information on social media is unreliable. So, making stories on the basis of that information is problematic.
How should we evaluate the opportunities and the threats of AI, from the point of view of journalism as a profession?
How should we evaluate the opportunities and the threats of AI, from the point of view of journalism as a profession?
In many countries around the globe, journalism is in trouble. In large parts of Asia and Africa freedom of the press is non-existent or under increasing state pressure. In ‘western’ regions – America, Europe, Oceania – professional journalism is confronted with an existential crisis.
This crisis has many faces:
- Interest in news is going down,
- news avoidance is going up,
- the relevance of the news is questioned,
- the willingness to pay for news is going down,
- the reliability of news is seen as problematic.
Many experts believe that the best way to fight these problems is by applying new technology. AI is welcomed as the most recent addition in that strategy.
I have serious doubts about that view, and I will try to explain why. I will make use of the research on ‘Journalistic Roles, Values and Qualifications in the Network Era’. I did this research with a colleague for the World Journalism Education Council.
Nowadays, a key problem for professional journalism is the lack of trust from the public. Regaining trust is a top priority.
Nowadays, a key problem for professional journalism is the lack of trust from the public. Regaining trust is a top priority.
One of the ways to regain trust is to be more transparent. In our research on how journalism educators around the world view the future of the profession an overwhelming 92% of the educators pointed to ‘being transparent’ as the most important attitude for journalists.
It is difficult to see how AI can fit into this. AI is far from transparent. It is essentially a black box technology. It is not clear how it comes to its results. Most people don’t understand AI anyway.
A second way to increase trust, is by raising accountability. In our research more than 80% of the educators found it important that students learn to ‘take responsibility for the choices that are made during the process.’
Being accountable is essential for the future of journalism, but it is not something that can easily be asked from a machine.
A third way to increase trust, is to invest in raising reliability. Professional journalists must be a beacon of reliability in the sea of unverified information and ungrounded opinions. Educators around the globe see as the most important future qualification for their students: ‘being able to evaluate sources’.
But it is very hard for AI to raise reliability, especially since social media are so often used as a prominent source.
A fourth way to increase trust, is to include ‘multiple perspectives’ in the reporting. This is seen as the number 3 qualification for students worldwide. Including multiple perspectives requires a deep knowledge and cultural sensitivity of the social context.
There is little evidence that AI has such knowledge or sensitivity.
A fifth way to increase trust, is to pay more attention to ethical codes in daily practice. Ethics is at the basis of being trustworthy. Ethical reporting may not always generate the highest number of clicks, but it is essential for gaining trust.
The difficulty with ethical considerations is that you cannot put them in algorithms.
The problems of professional journalism are huge and connected to the issue of trust. The solutions lie in the fields of transparency, of accountability, of reliability, of diversity and of ethics.
In itself, Artificial Intelligence does not offer a positive contribution to these solutions. We should ask ourselves: Is AI really part of the answer to the crisis in journalism or will it enlarge the crisis? In other words: is AI a solution for our problems or is AI a problem for our solutions?
We should ask ourselves: Is AI really part of the answer to the crisis in journalism or will it enlarge the crisis? In other words: is AI a solution for our problems or is AI a problem for our solutions?
If we want to take advantage of the benefits of AI, we will need clear and severe guidelines. The ‘Paris Charter on AI and Journalism’ is a good example of such guidelines.
It stresses among other things that human decision making must remain central to both long term strategies and daily editorial choices.
What is most important that we avoid a cultural lag with regard to AI. Professional journalists and news organisations, but also journalism researchers and educators, should play a major role in the governance of AI systems.
Artificial Intelligence should never become the sole domain of eager technicians and marketeers.
Under that condition, we might be able to benefit from the many new possibilities of AI, while overcoming the threats.
Dr. Nico Drok is Vice Chair of the World Journalism Education Council (WJEC) and professor emeritus of Media & Civil Society at the University of Windesheim in the Netherlands. He has conducted research on how journalism educators around the globe view the future of journalism and has been working in journalism education for more than 40 years.