Understanding Artificial Intelligence Part 2 - AI in Journalism

Friends thank you very much for taking out time from your busy schedule to read my blog(s). Sharing knowledge with you has become my passion now. I feel encouraged after reading your feedback in the comment’s column. Friends’ Everything, I do or say is PR. I’m delighted to share 127^th Blog titled ‘Understanding Artificial Intelligence Part 2 AI in Journalism’. 

Friends’ India’s AI market size which was estimated at USD 672.11 million in 2022, according to a NASSCOM report, now poised to add $500 billion to India's GDP by 2025. Additionally, India has secured the fifth spot globally for AI scientific publications and has the highest AI Skills Penetration Factor among G20 and OECD nations. The global AI market size has projected an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2030) of 17.30%, resulting in a market volume of US$738.80bn by 2030. Some of the top AI application using areas are gaming, fake story detection, plagiarism detection, content personalization, news-journalism, production planning and management, sales and marketing, and talent identification.

Out of the above-mentioned areas, it is exciting to understand how AI is being used in Journalism.  Friends’ AI is making major impacts in aggregating massive data analysis of the conversations across www and classifying them into themes to appreciate topics trending globally. The London School of Economics (LSE) recently published a survey of AI's use by 105 news and media organizations across 46 countries. 75% of news organization’s use AI in the first step in the news cycle, the gathering of 'raw' news.

Friends thanks to Web 4.0, world is ruled by digitization today and the digital technology has also empowered the journalism. AI tools have changed journalism by combining storytelling with data analytics making the journalism more efficient and with an improved experience for the audience. AI can save journalists valuable time by transcribing audio and video interviews by converting audio data into text so that they can focus on deriving insights rather than transcribing audio or video interviews.

AI written articles which are currently limited to simple and formulaic topics including stock market results, sports game scores, etc., with the help of AI journalists can do more complex work such as long-form articles, in-depth and research-based analyses and investigative journalism as AI can examine large databases and send journalists alerts as soon as a trend or anomaly emerges from big data.

By integrating AI powered audio transcription, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech technologies, newsrooms can significantly enhance their efficiency, accuracy, and content quality. This amalgamation streamlines workflow, helping newsrooms meet the demands of digital media.  AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources, improving the accuracy of news reporting. They can also identify trends and patterns that journalists may miss, providing a more comprehensive picture of events.

AI provide the journalists tools to identify fake news and lessen their impact on their readership.  AI systems can improve journalistic processes and workflows by helping the news-media houses streamline their processes for gathering information, contacting sources and back-end operations like dealing with the advertisers. Bias is a global issue and news media have no escape from it. However, AI can help in reducing the subjective interpretation of the data of the human as its machine learning algorithms are trained to consider accuracy.  

Some digital journalism studies have been undertaken on the terms such as computational journalism, algorithmic journalism, data-driven journalism, robot journalism or automated journalism which dominates the media discourse (Anderson, 2012). These technological developments, also, lead the news industry to consider the role of robots in journalism. There are discussions on who the new leader of the 21st-century newsrooms will be: the experienced journalist or the robot journalist.

Friends’ Automated journalism, also known as Robot journalism, makes use of natural language generation algorithms that are powered by AI in order to automatically convert data into various news stories, images, videos, and data visualizations and then distribute it via automated journalism platforms. An optimistic theory about tools like this is that they’ll simply make certain journalistic operations more productive, partially automating friction-filled processes, typing, transcription, maybe even puzzling over structure and freeing up resources to pursue, say, actual reporting. A great deal of what news organizations publish, including the incremental revelations of new or rare information most commonly associated with “the news,” is presented in fairly standardized forms and styles, the thinking goes. The news is made novel, and valuable, by what it reveals, not the particular style of its revelation or distribution.

News corporations such as Associated Press, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, the Guardian, and the New York Times are using Artificial Intelligence to write earning stories. There are news stories written in Forbes magazine that are untouched by human journalists.

Friends’ even though Artificial Intelligence is best suited for handling repetitive, data-driven tasks and making data-driven decisions however, human skills such as being inquisitive, exploratory, critical thinking and the art of storytelling requiring human creativity remain at the heart of journalism. The future of journalism is a go-go between journalists and AI, with the enduring spirit of inquiry and storytelling guiding the way.

In Part -3 I would discussing about AI in Communication – PR.

Thanks for reading the blog.

#####