Op-Ed: AI vs journalism as the future of information battles distrust and bias

AI -generated news isn’t even a new idea. About 10 years ago, there was “writing software” which was tried out for writing basic news like a baseball game. It did a simple narrative of the game and stuck in a few baseball expressions. Pretty forgettable.

“AI vs journalism” is a very different ballgame. According to the LA Times, even the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is being rewritten to reflect the AI era.

The current Code of Ethics is voluntary and pretty straightforward. Read it, and you’ll see where AI is a truly lousy fit for the ethics. A technology which is by definition involuntary and subject to instructions can hardly be said to be acting voluntarily.

Can the technology that gave us “Mecha Hitler” be trusted to have any ethics at all?  

Can an automated technology be objective when applying broad abstract principles?

Can a Kleenex-level AI agent be trusted with sensitive information? Can it be held accountable?

Can it be transparent?

Can it be unbiased?

What if it releases libellous or other legally actionable information?

It’s not like the current state of human journalism is a lotus-eating Nirvana, either. Polarization has done a long, ugly demolition job on the whole idea of trustworthy information. Distrust of news media is at an undisputed all-time high.

AI could easily make it a lot worse. Search “AI vs journalism,” and you’ll get a continuous dripping tap of articles. There’s not much good news in these things. The net takeaway is the predictable and turgid news that AI is fast and can synopsize anything.

So what, you may well ask.

Quality of information matters

It’s easy enough for an ephemeral political and corporate environment to be blasé about quality of information. Pointless, polarized populism has degraded the most basic standards of verification of information. As long as a few bots disbelieve the information, everything’s fine.

The Big Noises in news media just blunder along regardless. It went beyond farcical in 2016, and it’s now much less impressive. It’s pure speculation whether these guys can understand the information they receive. It’s odd. Big News used to have real influence. People used to be scared of bad press. Having demoted themselves to political spruikers, they’re now the busboys for press releases and delusional statements.

The problem with that rather obvious media weather report is that that’s not the problem. The problem is that the constant input of “wrong news” and “non-news” as distinct from “fake news” is that it creates huge gaps in available real information. It’s a blindfold for public perspective.

Maybe the Epstein Files, Mitch McConnell, AI data centres, the gigantic and ever-widening gap in US vs China geopolitics news, and even basic local news could get more coverage? You think anyone would be interested?

Check those four links above, and you’ll get lots of snippets. It’s the difference between a piece of popcorn and a four-course meal. How many ways can you look at a single piece of selective information? At what point do you have enough reliable information?

That’s just not happening.

The fightback to AI vs journalism

There’s an interesting sidelight to the LA Times article. What they call “creator journalists,” aka indies in practice, are the human sources of journalism. Journalists are a very mixed bag, and so they should be. The spectrum between saints and skanks is pretty broad.

You can make a pretty strong argument that somebody who at least knows how and why to cross-check information is a better option for real news than any bot. you could even strain the whole idea of real information to the point that somebody who knows what they’re talking about is a lot more valuable than a piece of temporary software that doesn’t.

At worst, you could suggest that verified hard information is a better basis for decisions than “whatever we can be bothered publishing”. Maybe, somewhere “out there in showbiz land” is a market for hard information?

The markets, interestingly, are now very wary of the “whatever” motif in real news. AI hype is the current showpiece. AI experts were particularly unimpressed with the hype when it started. Chatbots are not new. Bots are not new. Big outlays for guesswork-level ROI are new and unpopular. The markets, from their own perspective, are now realizing that babble doesn’t make bucks.

This is where the demand for hard news comes from. Bear in mind the markets have their own sources of real information. Big News is shooting itself in the foot with the fizzy claptrap about AI. People have now had time to see what AI can and can’t do, and they don’t want to pay for what it can’t do.

Real journalism is now absolutely necessary, whether anyone likes it or not.