The Augmented Newsroom: How AI will impact the journalism we know — GEN Summit 2018

Global Editors Network

Journalism has been around for over 200 years and the technology that might significantly change it has not even reached the ten year mark. Artificial intelligence will have more impact on content production than the invention of the Internet or social networks. Some institutes even predict that robots and algorithms will produce 90 percent of articles and videos by 2025. Editors and publishers may have missed the mobile and platform revolution, but they cannot miss the AI one.

With: Reginald Chua (Reuters), Lisa Gibbs (AP), Mar Gonzales Franco (Microsoft)

Ben Rudolph (Microsoft) will be the moderator of this session.
More info: https://www.gensummit.org/sessions/augmented-newsroom-ai-will-impact-journalism-know/ (opens in new tab)

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The Augmented Newsroom: How will AI impact the journalism we know? (opens in new tab)
Personalisation, trust, hope, and ethical standards: Can AI in newsrooms augment journalism? Or will the pitfalls outdo the benefits? A discussion about the augmented newsroom with Reginald Chua, Lisa Gibbs, and Mar Gonzalez-Franco, moderated by Ben Rudolph.

Some quotes>
Gonzalez-Franco, a researcher on perception and cognition, highlighted the theme of personalisation. ‘The best thing is to deliver personalisation’, she said. ‘And we need a lot of computing power for that. Correlations across very different and equally massive sets of data demand a supercomputer.’

Gonzalez-Franco agreed that computer correlations that allow predictions on human behaviour are going to be inevitable. ‘The banking industry runs on trust’, Gonzalez-Franco pointed out. ‘Using large amounts of human behaviour data has been significant to achieve better results on this issue. This has already happened in other industries. And it will explode.’

For Gonzalez-Franco, identifying who is consuming a media’s content is probably the biggest challenge AI can overcome.
‘We will be able to identify precisely who is consuming our content. This will happen to all organisations. One consequence is that ads will be better targeted, but content can also become more meaningful for each user. That’s going to be a big deal for news organisations.’

Gonzalez-Franco agreed that computer correlations that allow predictions on human behaviour are going to be inevitable. ‘The banking industry runs on trust’, Gonzalez-Franco pointed out. ‘Using large amounts of human behaviour data has been significant to achieve better results on this issue. This has already happened in other industries. And it will explode.’

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