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29/03/2024

Suddenly, Artificial Intelligence is Knocking at Our Doors

31.12.2023
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Without question, one of the most discussed new elements for content creation in 2023 has been Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Some compare AI to the invention of printing; others advise us to see AI as even more of an important development than the Internet. Many fear that AI will take jobs away from humans, and some teachers do not allow students to use it for their school work.
We in the media are at the center of all that is good  – and questionable – about Artificial Intelligence.  I have become familiar with the subject while researching material for my new book AI: The Next Revolution for Content Creation, which will be launched in January 2024.  
So, what have I learned about AI especially as it impacts the work of journalists and media people generally? Here are five main takeaways:

Big impact of AI

1. I am certain that AI is going to impact how we tell stories across platforms.   It is, in my view, the next big media revolution, one full of unknowns at the moment, but, without doubt, one that we will have to deal with in the years ahead.     I am not the only voice expressing this. Most recently, the CEO of Germany’s big media group, Axel Springer, had this to say: “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was – or simply replace it,” CEO Mathias Doepfner said in an internal letter to employees. 
Dance between humans and robots

2. This is a dance between humans and robots, which is starting slowly, but that will pick up speed.  In my book I mention that everything that the robots have learned through machine learning is what humans have contributed.  AI models like ChatGPT are trained on vast datasets containing text from the internet, books, articles, and more, to the astonishing figure of 175 billion parameters. These parameters represent the model‘s learned knowledge and include information about word usage, context, and relationships between words. 

The journalist and his assistant the robot
3. Because AI has such enormous amount of data, it can be a 


useful tool to journalists and researchers. That is why I insist that today, when we train journalists, we also train the robot sitting next to them.  As a journalism professor, teaching at Columbia University, I understand that I am teaching not just the journalism student, but also the robot „assistant“ who sits by his side.  We must learn the art of prompt engineering to be able to communicate with AI intelligently.  The key to the results we will get from Generative AI depend on how we word the prompt.  Remember, there are no codes for Artificial Intelligence, it is all about the words.  As one of the experts I interviewed for my book put it: „Garbage in, garbage ouit.“ Prompt engineering is perhaps the most important aspect of the dance between humans and robots, and I can foresee how universities will include courses on the subject in 
the future.
The better the prompt, the better result from the robot: it is words to words, so be articulat, be colorful, encourage creativity.  For example: I am writing a story about the first day of kindergarten, help me with outline of story, make it funny, upbeat, ideas for videos and audio.
Or, another example:
Act as if you are a  journalist building a mobile story. Help me 
Create a template to outline my story using headlines, summaries, video, photos, graphics, include subheads.
How journalists use AI

3. Here are the most often used aspects of AI in newsrooms today. Before the journalists began to use AI, marketing departments had already seized the opportunity to incorporate AI to develop algorithms to test audience behavior, and to stimulate subscriptions.  Now, the editors and journalists have begun to discover how helpful AI can be, specifically in these areas: 
-Generating story ideas.
-Helping with the outline of a story.
-Instantly generating  summaries of meetings and public events.
-Creating social media posts.
-Helping with creating headline variations.
-Transcribing information.
-Translating foreign languages.
-Laying out the pages of the print edition.
The fears about AI

4. With AI, there are many benefits when used properly, but dangers also exist. I devote a chapter in my book to Fears and Doubts.  Some of these are ethical: a human must check all output from AI to verify it for accuracy, and for instances of bias. Fake images, such as a photo of  the Pope in a puffer jacket went viral.There are also privacy concerns. AI‘s Impact on Surveillance
and Data Security and the erosion of privacy rights, as well as the
potential for misuse of personal data collected by AI systems for
surveillance and targeted advertising. But inaccuracy is perhaps the greates limitation associated with generative AI. This is especially 
true among journalists, who often express particular concerns about
AI-generated content and its potential inaccuracies.
Write AI guidelines for your organization

5. Every news organization already needs to have some type of guidelines for how to use AI. This is a working document that can be updated regularly, but it is imperative to have one already, to standardize the rules for using AI. I devote an entire chapter in my book to this important topic. Here is what The Guardian newspaper of the United Kingdom, wrote for its AI guidelines/protocol:
“GenAI tools are exciting but are currently unreliable. There is no room for unreliability in our journalism, nor our marketing, creative and engineering work. At a simple level, this means that the use of genAI requires human oversight. We will seek to use genAI tools editorially only where it contributes to the creation and distribution of original journalism”. 

“When we use genAI, we will focus on situations where it can improve the quality of our work, for example by helping journalists interrogate large data sets, assisting colleagues through corrections or suggestions, creating ideas for marketing campaigns, or reducing the bureaucracy of time-consuming business processes.”
THE GUARDIAN newspaper, UK, 2023.

Finally, there are tremendous opportunities to use AI to create illustrations through a variety of programs. The human prompts the robot with a description of the illustration she wants, with specifics about style, color, mood, then waits for the results which usually come in a matter of seconds.
For example, I prompted the program Midjourney with the following:
Poster illustration of  visual journalist Mario Garcia‘s dream of the newsroom of the future where AI will be welcome but within parameters, what is it that AI can do better than humans, but allow humans to do what they can do best. Every member of newsroom will believe in the power of AI totally convinced that their journalism is mobile first. and tell stories in words and visuals together. And create a print product as a lean back platform. with mobile as lean forward journalism of the iPhone screen. AI acts as major helpers, like extra associate editors. Massimo Vignelli style, red, black, white, yellow tones. - @Mario Garcia
Here are examples of what Midjourney produced:



Conclusion
One can’t be a journalist today and NOT be connected to the technology that allows how content is created and how we utilize data that is available about audience and engagement. AI will facilitate these processes.
Five years from now AI will not be a “love it or leave it” type of choice. By then, I think we will have overcome the doubts and fears of AI that we have today, and will have come to accept it the way we do the Internet today. The main mantra of my new book on AI is this: AI can be of tremendous assistance to humans for a variety of tasks, but that process begins with human input, requires human supervision, and ends with human evaluation and amendment.
Let the dance between humans and robots begin!
New York, November 2023.
-by Mario Garcia- 


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