Author and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, William Jelani Cobb gave a speech on the challenges of Artificial intelligence for the media. He intervened at the last #NPDJ conference, organized by the Sciences Po Journalism School. 

Do you think AI is something new or just a continuation of previous technologies? If so, what are the implications? 

Artificial intelligence has been a part of our culture and imagination for a long time. In science fiction we’d conceived of artificial intelligence long before it became publicly accessible. There’s a lot of discussion about the future of AI with both excitement and fear. It’s difficult to parse what to listen to. Not even experts seem to be on the same page. 

What does this mean for journalism? 

Without clarity it’s hard to discern what these changes mean for journalism. AI is an unignorable force which journalism has to organize itself around, exactly as it did with the introduction of the commercial internet in the 1990s and with the mobile Social Web in the 2000s. I always say to journalism students at Columbia and Sciences Po: “Technology is a long way from replicating the reporting and production work that you are training to do.”

ChatGPT and other generative AI are technologies which cannot do anything more than mimic human connections. A language model cannot knock on doors, listen to answers, push for better answers and ask deeper questions. What it can do is create both opportunities and risks. Generative IA can’t discern whether or not a politician is taking a bribe. It can’t discern whether or not policies are advantageous or disadvantageous to the public. It can’t tell on its own how a particular politician may vote or things that will affect individual lives. 

For what purposes can AI be used in journalism? 

Much of journalism’s foray into AI is invisible progress, assisting journalists in tedious tasks such as translating news alerts from one language to another or automatically writing Public Safety incidents into the content Management systems of newspapers. The goal is to free us up to do the actual work of reporting. With newsrooms shrinking journalists need to do more with less. Much of this progress is happening because of open-source development. The AI company Hugging Face – born in France and founded in New York City – is the number one place for these kinds of open and accessible tools. 

What are the risks of AI for journalists? Does it pose threats to the profession?

Realistically, when we think about the way that this technology operates, it will likely amplify more than it will change. Those with lower ethical standards can use these new tools more efficiently than those of us who are bothered and concerned about ethic and consequences. We’ve all suffered slogging through the search results of hundreds of automated reports. This is a fire hose of misinformation and it can lead to further abstraction of reader trust in the news. This cheap production machine will push models for journalism even harder at a point where many are already breaking. We can hope journalists will be freed by AI technologies to do more important work but there’s a risk that they will be freed from work completely from all but the most mission driven organizations. Our crisis is profoundly centered in our local news and we are now seeing local news organizations that have no actual reporters and are entirely automated. Outlets are giving information but can’t properly be referred to as journalism. This is an area in which we will likely see exacerbation and amplification. The development of AI, like the development of the web and social media, is a human story about power.

What advice would you give to young journalists?

Our brief as journalists is to investigate, understand and help our audiences navigate these changes while navigating it ourselves. Journalists have an opportunity to take advantage of these tools. They can use this moment to take our industry forward. We do not have to be the victims of poor AI generated articles! Rigorous ethical reporting is still valuable to our world, perhaps more than ever and these tools can help journalists do it better and faster. Technology is what we make of it. It is fair to be intimidated by machines that create text but that’s not all what journalists do. The spirit of journalism is reporting, sourcing and storytelling. With AI there is no reason for us to believe that these skills are not as important as they always have been. 

Cet article a initialement été publié dans le numéro 30 d’Émile, paru en juillet 2024.