Technology in media

By Emmanuel Perilla

Technology in the media is a phenomenon that should be accepted and encouraged, but should still be cautioned because even machines can have deadly flaws. In the report “The Future of Augmented Journalism” it states, “Farr added that while the Al is compelling, it remains flawed. “For instance, the system is dependent on the orientation of a subject’s face -head-on shots are preferable and dependent on an unobstructed view of the subject.”

Examples like this show that even smart machines have their limits. Media professionals and those working in the media industry should use them for their accuracy and their ability to gather relevant information but they shouldn’t be used as the sole medium to do this work.

The report “The Future of Augmented Journalism” states, “The same method could have been used by a sports journalism team looking to flag whether an athlete is on steroids (using the statistics of athletes convicted of using steroids as training data) or even a team investigating a small town it suspects is home to illegal mining practices (using satellite images of areas that are known to be home to illegal mines as training data).

Smart machines can do a great service for the media industry in the future. The more they are integrated into professions like journalism, the more the efficiency of journalistic publications will increase and the better services the public can except. While smart machines will be a great asset to use for all media professionals, people should be very careful to not substitute these machines for still doing some of the research yourself and still bringing your own fresh perspective to stories.

If media professionals get too comfortable and allow these machines to do the majority of the work required to run industries, then they will lose their originality.

For example, the smart machines will be able to do the background check on facts and statistics but the journalists still have to make sure that they do their own type of research and are keeping in mind that they may be missing the whole truth. If a journalist is assigned to cover a specific politician, the smart machines can certainly provide them with an extensive list on that person but they shouldn’t be satisfied solely on the input of the machine. The journalist should still go and find angles on the person outside of the information from the smart machine and find whatever else that’s relevant to that story.

Even if smart machines become great assets to media professionals they should just be seen as a tool to enhance the craft, it should never become something that’s seen as the craft itself.

Machines should be used to improve the quality of media, but shouldn’t replace the actual people who are media professionals. So as technology expands, people in media should be eager to use it to better serve the public, but they still have the responsibility to give their efforts and talents to the craft and not rely on a machine to do their job for them.