AI will not take over journalism anytime soon. Also, chatbots are still boring
Johannes Klingebiel of the innovation unit at Süddeutsche Zeitung talks about future of branding content, ads, chatbots, AI and voice assistants.
Johannes Klingebiel works for Süddeutsche Zeitung at their brand and innovation studio. He is interested in the future of advertising, publishing, also AI and chatbots.
Here are the key points we talked about:
Brands should not pay for investigative journalism
You surely remember this piece by the NY Times which they did as part of the promotion for the second season of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. It was a deep dive into the world of women prisons.
As Johannes put it “this is the holy grail of branded content”. The brand gets exposure, the paper gets recognition for doing a nice piece of journalism. In the end everyone is happy.
But consider the not so lately published Paradise Papers — if you read this explainer by the SZ you will find out that some of the supporters of ICIJ, the investigative organisation behind the revelations, are on the list of people concerned in the offshore leak.
Johannes added that the ICIJ dealt with this issue by straightforward reporting about it.
Considering Netflix is not investing in women prisons and has no business ties to it, one could say it ended well that a brand supported such a pice. But as Johannes put it — he would not want to see this becoming the standard.
The NY Times branded piece on women prisons was published in 2014.
In the podcast we also touched the topic of “is branded and sponsored content” good for journalism. So, is it? Well, it's a topic for another occasion and a whole episode to spend on it.
According to Johannes — if your branded/sponsored content is marked so that readers/viewers can distinguish it and gives them value, that should be your goal.
Chatbots are still boring
Johannes has been experimenting with chatbots since the “chatbot craze” begun.
In his 2016 Medium blog Johannes explains why he thinks chatbots are boring:
Their functionality is limited to sending you articles, which fit a given keyword or phrase. You can then subscribe to those keywords, which will prompt the bot to send you related articles. Depending on the bot you might also receive a daily dose of the most read or most relevant pieces.
“There is no natural language processing, there is no reasoning, there is no AI,” explains Johannes in the podcast why chatbots are boring.
Voice assistants are fun, but still not there
Johannes owns a Google Home, both David and Marc have a voice assistant at home, so we got discussing how we feel about them.
The conclusion came quite quickly while discussing— in our cases voice assistants are used mainly for reading the headlines, playing podcasts and music or telling the time, date and the weather forecast.
If we take apart the name — voice assistant — we get the “voice”part, which is quite nice, as Johannes put it, and then the “assistant” part, which is not really an assistant we are expecting. It needs some work.
In Marc's case the Google Home could not even tell him when the next train departs from Magdeburg to Berlin, but when you google it the answer comes up instantly.
AI is not taking over journalism anytime soon
Johannes considers the whole AI spectrum interesting for journalism nonetheless — if used correctly it can be a useful tool.
AI is already used by big news agencies to write sport articles or business news, recently it was reported the Reuters is scooping its rivals using intelligent machines that mine Twitter for news stories.
When we talk about AI today, it's not the sci-fi version we got to know from pop culture. But according to Johannes there are use cases where AI shines today — analysing large datasets or transcribing audio.
According to Johannes newsrooms should look at AI at the moment as a tool that helps them make journalists' works quicker and more efficiently.
Although there is a lot of negativity around AI, we should not be afraid as it is good at recognising things, translating or transcribing things, but, AI is really bad at recognising context or let's say going out there and interviewing sources, Johannes explains.
So if you are not doing anything that could be easily automated, you should not be worried about the near future of your job.
Useful Links to the things we talked about
“Edgeland Reisegruppe” is the futurist Facebook group started by Johannes.
Thoughts on Journalism is a Medium publication started by Johannes and worth following if you are not already doing so.
Johannes has a newsletter in German, you can subscribe on his website.
Katharine Viner (editor-in-chief of The Guardian) writes: The Guardian is now funded by more than 800,000 supporters from more than 140 countries. … We are encouraged and cheered by the hundreds of thousands of you who are supporting our journalism. In the last year alone, the number of readers who support us regularly has more than doubled; and we now receive more income from our readers than we do from advertisers.
Here are a few people writing about future Johannes recommends to follow:
Amy Webb is as she puts it a quantitative futurist. She has recently put out the 2018 Tech Trends For Journalism Report. It's free to download, so go ahead.
Scott Smith is the founder & managing partner at Changeist, which is a post-national research, consulting and creative group that helps organizations navigate complex futures.
Johannes Kleske is the founding partner @thirdwaveberlin, strategic designer, futures researcher, public speaker — currently doing a master’s in futures studies.
Check Your Facts podcast is produced by:
If you liked this story, you can appreciate it by 👏 and by sharing it. Tweet your feedback at @Factspod or email us at hello@checkyourfatcs.eu. Also, you can subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcasts (iTunes) | RSS
