A recent article in The Hollywood Reporter offers a chronicle of how journalists may soon be adjudicated in the court of AI justice. As disturbing as that piece may be, it did contain an intriguing muse about the future of journalism, and the future of work.
In it, entrepreneur Aron D’Souza — the founder of the company aiming to “put journalists on trial” for their reporting — says that the very last job for humans will be distinguishing between truth and fiction. Knowledge and physical work will eventually cease to exist, D’Souza said, and all that will be left will be “interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”
As we ponder, in this issue, the ways that artificial intelligence is wending its way into people’s lives, we can’t help but turn the mirror on ourselves. While artificial intelligence is now being trained to purportedly assess the fairness of reporters’ work, as the article in The Hollywood Reporter details, we’re also using it to transcribe and process interviews and meetings in a more efficient manner, to analyze large swaths of numerical data, and as an idea-generator for visuals and graphics, to name just a few. If we use AI as a tool for images or as a significant tool in reporting, we say so, per our own AI policy.
All of this, of course, is done with the same code of ethics we’ve relied on for decades: one that requires us to verify information, to gather facts from multiple sources to challenge assumptions and to arrive at the closest approximation of the truth that we can muster from all of that effort.
We do all of this, even while we encounter more misinformation on the daily to sort out and interpret. As we scroll through our social media feeds, more and more AI-generated videos challenge us to suss out what’s “real” and what’s been generated from the AI ether. Will there come a time when the authenticity and originality is stripped completely from our social feeds, to the point where people lose interest in engaging? Or perhaps we’re already there, as anti-AI social platforms such as Cara, Perfectly Imperfect and Retro Pop attempt to offer a more human-centered approach to online connection.
In the world of social media, the irony is that the new platforms which are attempting to filter out content using artificial intelligence are likely tapping into forms of artificial intelligence to do so. So even while the effect is a more human one, the snake is still eating its own tail. In the world of journalism, where events from real-life meetings or press conferences or breaking news scenes are interpreted by real-life humans in real time, we can’t rely on an AI-driven anti-AI system to offer us the tools of perception. Journalists still need to show up, see things with their own eyes, assess the facts given to them by others, and deliver a product that is rooted in trust and accountability.
If we observe that trust in social media platforms is waning due to a barrage of deepfakes, then it would follow that going forward, as D’Souza mentioned, society is going to need a lot more trained human observers. Journalism needs more eyes and ears — real ones on the ground. A human-centered approach, rooted in university training and a code of standards and ethics, is the path forward; not machine-crafted regurgitations of press releases churned out to favor an algorithm that only values volume and clicks.
In recent years, people have had a lot of fun talking about the demise of journalism and the closure of newspaper after newspaper. But in the age of AI, we’re talking about the demise of so many other professions, from doctors to lawyers to every other knowledge worker, that it now feels like journalists have something of a leg up. We’re far ahead in the process of fighting for our human value to be recognized.
Today, journalism is ever more becoming the bridge between the digital world and the humans who live in and around it. In a world that increasingly needs more humanity, journalism is more alive than ever.
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