Artificial intelligence in Journalism.
The role of artificial intelligence in journalism.
Introduction: Artificial intelligence in journalism.
Artificial intelligence in journalism is now a reality. Artificial intelligence has entered almost all aspects of our lives, including journalism. Due to the advent of digital media, we unknowingly consume content based on artificial intelligence everywhere. Whether it’s YouTube’s recommended videos, your Facebook feed, or the kinds of advertisements you see on regular websites, they are all specially catered to you with the use of AI.
Similarly, AI is now entering the field of journalism, too. Due to social media’s influence, the role of artificial intelligence in journalism has increased significantly. Hence, media companies are actively seeking out help from AI to boost up their content.
Keep reading to know more about artificial intelligence in journalism.
Automated writing using artificial intelligence in Journalism.
For many years, media outlets had to depend on expert journalists to write news articles or report on events every day. I don’t mean to say this is no longer the case, but there are new strategies for content creation and basic communications thanks to AI. There is an increasing number of mundane articles, or articles that are merely reports, written by AI so that professional journalists can focus on writing more in-depth articles.
Artificial intelligence has greatly helped journalism in the past few years. Many companies have in-house software that can generate news articles in minutes, if not seconds. All artificial intelligence needs is data. Now, this data can either be in the form of digits, audio, or video. The software will be able to generate newsworthy articles on them.
Major media outlets like the Washington Post, BBC, and Bloomberg are using AI to publish news articles with the help of language software. Suppose you feed any kind of data into an AI application, for instance, the details of a company’s assets. In that case, the software will automatically interpret the numbers and give you an article that’s ready to be published.
Read More: Artificial Intelligence and disinformation.
It is highly useful because not only does it save time, but it also affords other writers the time to delve into deeper topics that they wish to explore for their own pieces. Since AI is not advanced enough to add nuance to opinion pieces, that part of journalism is left to human journalists.
Nonetheless, the role of artificial intelligence in journalism is increasingly positive and helps the world stay immediately updated.
Spotting trends and bias at scale.
It can often be difficult and time consuming for humans to codify data, especially if it is data that deals with large scale trends. However, for AI, this can happen in no time. Today, journalists are using artificial intelligence to track major trends and in global economies that help them interpret incoming changes and make speculations about the future in their articles.
Another interesting and important element of using AI in journalism is that it helps reduce bias in interpreting the data. While it would be tiresome to physically track down and identify the biases in journalism, it is much easier for a bot to do it.
For example, there is an artificial intelligence software called the Janetbot. This system helped in analyzing the difference in the ratio of gendered pictures appearing in a newspaper. However, it had to be stopped because the AI was not advanced enough to detect gender differences.
Nonetheless, since artificial intelligence is still an emerging technology, such examples give out hope that perhaps one day, all quantitative research can be done using AI. Once that is achieved, we can know much more about the world than we didn’t before. Plus, the journalism industry can flourish because data-heavy reports can be automatically generated for time-saving reasons, while still leaving analysis and commentary to journalists themselves. The public then has access to succinct data and potentially higher-quality and more informed reporting.
Personalized design for readers.
The framework that AI uses to create personalized designs for readers is the same as the framework used for any other social media platform. Basically, AI bots can detect how frequently a reader reads a certain section of a newspaper. These bots can also detect the type of articles, the nature of the newspaper, and the demographic of the audience, among other things.
These sections can include things like the kinds of pages more time is spent on by a user, the nature of the pages, and all details linked to any online presence that the user has. Thus, AI collects all this information and generates personalized designs that would appeal to the reader based on the reader’s previous preferences.
Read More: Real-world applications of artificial intelligence in web design.
AI can especially help those news outlets that primarily operate through an online framework. One of the things that they will not have to worry about will be the newspaper’s organization as every article will have its special link that would be catered to the reader.
The fact that artificial intelligence can now customize designs for readers means web journalists will not have to put in the extra effort to make their articles sound and look more appealing. It will also reduce the need for journalists or for marketing companies to painstakingly pick out articles that would appeal to the masses because AI can now cater to individuals.
Today, companies are also using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to gain more insight into the markets and their needs. Not only can robots give replies to customer queries, but they can also generate reports and collect data based on their interaction with the customers. This helps the companies market their products better, which is, in this case, journalism.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, artificial intelligence is a great tool that has many benefits for the field of journalism. The fact that several news sources are already using AI is a testament to its reliability.
However, we must remember that AI is still a technology that has not been fully developed yet. In fact, it could take years before we can fully know the extent to which we can use AI. So, keep your hopes up and experiment with AI in journalism to test the waters.
