AI Journalists: Revolutionizing News Reporting or Just Another Technological Hype?
Summary:
Ex-senior director at Google News, Jim Albrecht has envisioned how artificial intelligence journalists, powered by large language models like ChatGPT, can revolutionize the field of journalism. These AI tools could provide an interactive experience for readers, allowing them to converse with the source about the article. However, Albrecht's utopian outlook should be met with measured expectations as in the past, radical predictions about changes in the media landscape have proven premature.
Consider a scenario where you are reading a gripping news article and the moment you finish it, you have the chance to directly engage with the reporter who authored it. As per Jim Albrecht, ex-senior director at Google News, in his recent Washington Post op-ed, this may soon be the reality with artificial intelligent journalists making their way onto the scene.
As per Albrecht's vision, cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT could lead the upcoming revolution in the journalism sector, much akin to the profound change brought in by the inception of the internet in the early 2000s. Pre-internet era was dominated by mass media like TV and print mediums including newspapers and magazines. As much as these mediums are still relevant, their significance has been drastically reduced by the advent of internet-based news portals.
The introduction of a user-friendly internet platform made quick access to information an absolute breeze, whether to glance at a sports update, or to find a good deal on a piece of antique furniture. However, despite the upscale shift in dissemination and availability of news, the articles themselves remained fundamentally the same. But, as Albrecht suggests, the tide has begun to shift following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022.
This technology marvel was initially capable of generating data from any pre-2021 source due to certain technological restrictions. Fast track to just over a year later, ChatGPT along with similar systems, can now access live updates on the web as they happen. What’s even more fascinating is that these LLMs can rephrase and condense information from diverse sources and present a comprehensive report to users within a single conversation.
Albrecht visualizes this groundbreaking shift as a precursor to another wave of revolution in journalism. He anticipates a time when readers will favor the interactive journalism facilitated by ChatGPT and its peers over static news pieces. The appeal lies in the user's ability to engage in a chat with these AI-powered “intelligent agents” about the subject matter, rather than just reading it.
The notion that readers in future might prefer an AI interface that offers a personalized conversation about news articles over human reporters sounds fascinating. But, there's a caveat, these AI tools can simultaneously interact with millions of readers and potentially have a one-on-one conversation.
Has the era of traditional journalism met its demise? Not really, especially when considering how quickly optimistic forecasts of change in the media landscape often prove to be premature. Since 2015, we've had predictions of the death of print and online journalism when Facebook began leaning towards video content. Nevertheless, by 2017 a lot of organizations that had tried to keep pace with this shift found out that the rumors of online media’s death were indeed premature.
Meanwhile, seamless tools like ChatGPT have come to the forefront and a handful of newsrooms have experimented with using AI to create their news pieces, albeit with mixed outcomes. While some have tasted success – particularly those that were transparent about their methodology, others have faced humiliation due to an absence of disclosure and glaring inaccuracies leading to alienation of their reader base.
Published At
2/7/2024 8:45:00 PM
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