Evolving AI Journalism… Will reporters disappear?

Updated on
October 18, 2023
|
Insight
Published
April 27, 2023

The technology of artificial intelligence (AI) has already entered deeply into the realm of journalism. It’s not a ridiculous story, artificial intelligence robots are already writing articles.

Research by CNBC reports that stock, sports, and weather articles written by AI have already been commercialized. The era where AI even checks the facts of articles is coming.

Bloomberg News in the United States is creating about 25% of its articles by AI. The key is that AI searches through various data to find the facts that will be the subject of an article and deliver it to the reporter.

These days, many problems have been mentioned in the news because Opne AI’s chatGPT is used to replace homework. Let’s compare the ever-evolving GPT first.


GPT-1

It was released in 2018 and consisted of a single transformer decoder. It had 117 million parameters and was primarily designed for unsupervised language modeling.

GPT-2

It was released in 2019 and was a major improvement over GPT-1. It contained 1.5 billion parameters and was capable of generating impressive language samples that were difficult to distinguish from human-written text. However, its release was controversial due to concerns about its potential misuse for generating fake news and other forms of disinformation.

GPT-3

Debuted in 2020, the current iteration of GPT is the most formidable version yet, boasting an impressive 175 billion parameters that enable it to answer questions and even generate code. Despite its impressive capabilities, similar to GPT-2, this technology has also sparked apprehensions regarding the possibility of its misuse, emphasizing the need for regulations in the development and application of AI models.

GPT-3.5

Prior to the end of 2021, OpenAI reported that GPT-3.5 underwent training on a blend of text and code. Like its forerunner, GPT-3, and other AI models that generate text, GPT-3.5 acquired the ability to comprehend the relationships between sentences, words, and subparts of words by processing extensive quantities of online content, such as numerous Wikipedia pages, social media posts, and news articles.

GPT-4

The biggest change of GPT-4 is that it is a multimodal model that recognizes multiple data types, unlike GPT-3.5. In other words, if you enter an image as well as text in the prompt, it will interpret it and give you the answer you want.

If you look at the example above, you give a picture and ask what you can make with the ingredients shown in this picture, and you answer a variety of dishes.In the case of GPT-3.5, it was possible to process up to 3,000 words of text.

GPT-4 can handle up to 25,000 words, an eight-fold increase. It is now possible to input really long texts.

AUTOGPT

Created by Toran Bruce Richards, Auto-GPT is an open-source tool that leverages GPT-4. Richards was motivated to develop this application as he observed that conventional AI models, although potent, often face challenges when dealing with tasks that necessitate long-term planning or require independent refinement based on real-time feedback.

Auto-GPT falls under the category of recursive AI agents, which denotes its capacity to employ the outputs it generates to generate novel prompts independently.

“Will the day come when AI writing, advancing in this way, causes all journalism to disappear?

Let’s take a deeper dive into the topic. What specific aspect of AI writing and its impact on journalism would you like to explore further?

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Journalism

A reporter’s job is to write an article, and this is because artificial intelligence is getting closer and closer to being as good as human intelligence. It is said that the time taken by artificial intelligence to write a simple article takes less than one second on average.

It is a commonly held belief that artificial intelligence can write an article just as quickly as a human. Thus journalists around the world are finding creative ways to use AI to report on news material, organize information, discover unexpected connections, and distribute stories.

AI systems typically assist publishers in three areas:

  • Research: AI automates transcribing interviews, keeps track of current events, translates foreign news sources, collects pertinent posts on social media, and cross-references stored articles, documents and documents to gain fresh insights. It is used to do all of this.
  • Article writing: AI provides assistance with fact-checking and word choice, as well as monitoring local crime and educational levels and real estate prices, in order to customize stories for varied audiences.
  • Distribution: Using AI to automatically assess news reports and label them by content makes it easier for readers to locate articles with related topics. As a result, AI technology simplifies tasks for news outlets, as well as offering rapid fact-checking.

Therefore, journalists are constantly mentioned as one of the jobs that will disappear due to the development of artificial intelligence. They predict that the vague claim that artificial intelligence robots will replace reporters comes from not properly understanding the work of reporters.

A journalist’s job is largely divided into reporting and article writing. There are many reports of artificial intelligence robots being able to write articles by automatically generating a large amount of text based on simple facts.

For example, a robot can gather raw data such as sports news or stock market data, and then automatically write sentences such as “Apple’s products were sold well today” or “Ford Motor Company stock prices fell sharply” through the application of natural language generation technology.

ai news release

The Potential Role of Artificial Intelligence in Assisting Journalists

The field of journalism revolves around the area of coverage, and article writing is simply a medium to express the information gathered. The process of reporting involves significant effort to engage with people and places, making it impossible for artificial intelligence to replace the human-to-human interaction that is essential in humanities. Essentially, the articles produced by AI are only capable of rearranging simple facts in a pre-determined format. In other words, AI cannot replace reporters entirely, as it only covers a portion of their work.

However, journalists are not threatened by the advent of artificial intelligence. In fact, they anticipate that AI will be able to generate straightforward articles such as those that involve simple data and breaking news much faster. By handling these tasks, AI can help journalists save time, allowing them to focus on covering the field more comprehensively and writing high-quality articles. Rather than eliminating jobs, artificial intelligence has the potential to preserve the essence of journalism.

Journalists suggest that AI-generated articles will enable them to work more efficiently and effectively. Despite its advanced capabilities, AI cannot replace the coverage area, which is the core of journalistic work. Instead of creating a sense of fear that AI will replace humans, there should be a focus on utilizing AI tools as a resource to enhance the quality of reporting.

Open-source AI tools, such as the auto GPT and other large language models, can be accessed using API keys, making them a valuable asset for long-term use.

By utilizing AI technology and machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing, AI writers can help improve the speed and quality of journalistic work, while also making it more accessible to social media platforms. In conclusion, AI tools have the potential to revolutionize the field of journalism, but their role should be viewed as a supplement to human effort, rather than a substitute.

The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

In an article in Forbes, Google says AI is intended to help reporters focus on stories requiring creative insight, analysis, and ethical judgment.

Artificial intelligence will never be able to replace human broadcasters because human broadcasters have the ability to make you feel. AI broadcasters have no empathy, they cannot interview anyone anymore, they cannot even question anyone, they can only read out the facts and figures without feeling any passion behind their words. They are emotionless and cold, like machines.

Leading into the future, AI broadcasters will be a tool for people to use to disseminate information. But this is not enough to support journalism’s core values of freedom and democracy and human freedom. The real journalists are on the front lines of reporting, they need to report on the situation right now and listen to what everyone has to say. This gives them a greater understanding of what is really going on in a situation that leads to greater truth.

Just because you have AI does not mean you have journalism. The future of news is about reporting through people, it is about having the ability to feel and to understand things from different perspectives. The future of news is not about having an AI that can just read out the facts and figures from an algorithm.

AI Studios and chatGPT's Future

Enhancing Journalistic Roles and Innovating News Production
Enhancing Journalistic Roles and Innovating News Production by ai studios

Besides discussing one aspect of article writing, AI studios are also bringing a new perspective to actual news production. Technologies like chatGPT are changing the way news is created and are expected to play a significant role in making newsrooms more efficient.

AI studios can assist journalists in various ways. For example, chatGPT can provide quick answers and help understand stories from different angles. This allows journalists to quickly keep up with real-time news developments and understand a wide range of opinions.

Furthermore, AI studios can help present information visually. By using chatGPT, data and graphs can be shown in a way that makes it easier for readers to understand complex information.

However, it's important to see AI studios as tools that work alongside, rather than replace, human journalists. Human judgment, ethical considerations, and creativity remain crucial in news production. One of the main values of news is to include a variety of viewpoints and opinions, which is something human journalists are best at.

In conclusion, AI studios have the potential to bring innovation and improvement to news production, but their role should be seen as a partnership with human involvement. This is likely the most effective way to advance the future of the news industry.

FAQs

Q. How is AI used in journalism?

AI is not intended to replace journalists, but rather to assist them in their work by taking over routine tasks and allowing them to focus on more value-added content such as long-form journalism, feature interviews, analysis, data-driven journalism, and investigative journalism.

Q. Will AI replace journalists?

It is unlikely that AI will completely replace journalists. While AI can assist with certain tasks such as writing articles based on structured data, transcribing interviews, and fact-checking, it cannot replace the human skills and judgment required for in-depth reporting, analysis, and storytelling.

Q. Is journalism at risk from AI?

AI tools that are trained on published content from news outlets pose a threat to media businesses by allowing users to access information from news archives without paying the companies that produced it. This effectively allows users to bypass the paywalls of vast numbers of publications.

Q. What are three way AI can benefit journalism?

1. Automated writing: AI can be used to write articles based on structured data, such as sports scores, financial reports, and election results. This allows for the rapid generation of news articles and frees up journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting.

2. Transcription: AI can be used to transcribe audio and video interviews, saving journalists time and effort.

3. Fact-checking: AI can be used to fact-check articles by cross-referencing information with reliable sources.

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