For the last year, I’ve been privileged to be a part of the Online News Association’s AI Innovator Collaborative. It’s a group of people working in journalism, including journalism education, who are actively experimenting with the responsible and ethical use of AI in the context of news.
While AI + Journalism may sound like something new and even scary, AI has been used in the context of journalism as long as the field has been around — going back to the mid-2000s, and even earlier if you count “computer-aided reporting” as part of AI, which I think would be accurate if you include machine learning and template-driven content creation. It’s almost certain that you have been consuming AI-aided news for a while, especially if you have ever read a story on the Associated Press, Reuters or Bloomberg about quarterly earnings reports.
This week about 100 of us got together in Detroit for the ONA x Newsroom Robots AI Leadership Summit. Attendees included journalists and editors from everywhere from the large operations like the New York Times, Detroit Free Press and Business Insider to smaller or non-profit entities like MinnPost, Outlier Media and several educational institutions. What we all share in common is that we are experimenting on the edge of possibility with AI, which we all feel is already fundamentally changing the way news is produced, consumed and interacted with.
Day one was a series of keynote conversations from leaders and changemakers in digital journalism and AI. It started with a welcome from Niketa Patel, ONA’s new Executive Director and CEO, who outlined how AI exploration is one of her big initiatives this year for ONA. Following that was a keynote from Nikita Roy — who produces the acclaimed Newsroom Robots podcast. (Yes, their names are similar and they even have a similar look, but if you pay attention their names are one vowel apart!)
Nikita Roy’s presentation was about how AI and the way different generations are using it are already reshaping the industry. She underscored how the collapse of search (with Google Searches falling for the first time in 22 years as people turn more to chatbots on their phones) and the fact that Chatbots drive 96% less traffic than Google Search means that news providers need to “prepare for the death of the article as we know it.”
I’m still trying to wrap my head around what “death of the article” means, but in essence I think it says that the facts, figures and information people get about their world are being increasingly intermediated through chatbots which summarize what they capture online in real time without necessarily providing links back to the sources (the articles). This also poses other questions and raises new possibilities. If people are telling us they want information and data through AI chatbots, why aren’t news publishers providing their own chatbots directly to their audiences? Is it possible to create news-focused chatbots that do a better job with local / topical audience information than they get from AI companies?
A follow-up presentation and exercise by Sam Guzik of the Future Today Institute had us all using FTI’s Axes of Uncertainty exercise to predict and discuss various futures of journalism. The group I was in predicted four possible futures of what would happen if newsrooms lost or regained a direct relationships with readers (perhaps using their own AI products), and the intersection with the AI industry being driven by strong ethics, or laissez-faire, efficiency-based decision-making without regard to ethics.
I’m sad to report that we concluded that the current trajectory is driven by the tech companies and publishers rushing toward them (a familiar story), but without journalists having the ability to push back due to zero regulations that put ethics and human-centered factors first. This is the worst possible “Black Mirror Episode” for journalism. How do we get out of that, and is it even possible at this point? A lot depends on the choices of publishers (the bosses) and what decisions they make, especially when it comes to protecting the agency of the newsrooms and arming them with AI tools that the publishing companies control. It also depends on them not just taking the big money from AI companies, like they did in the past with Google and Facebook, only to be later left at the altar.
The day ended with a live taping of a Newsroom Robots Podcast with Roy and Zach Seward, who is in charge of AI initiatives at the New York Times. It was a wide-ranging discussion, and I will leave reporting on that to the Podcast itself and will link it in here when it is published. But one thing that stood out to me was that Seward found out about the Times suing OpenAI as an employee from a news alert through the New York Times — just like the rest of us.
All this leads us to Day Two of the conference, which is an Unconference format with sessions chosen by participants. My hope is that this will lead to more discussions about what we can do that uses AI in a positive way that also helps journalists, newsrooms, publishers and their audiences for the better. I’ll post an update about that after it happens but I’m excited to have been chosen to present about Vibe Coding, which is a new way to code immersive web experiences working with AI as the coder.