WHAT is journalism going to be like in 15 years?
The changes artificial intelligence (AI) has already brought can help journalists prepare for the future, said Mariano Blejman, chief executive officer of news consumption behaviour for SmartStory.ai and founder of Media Party in Argentina.
In April, Blejman participated in AI and the Future of Journalism, a forum organised by the Open Society Foundation, which included media leaders from around the Spanish-speaking world, including Filipino Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa.
Blejman shared some of the learnings from that group as well as his own thoughts about the future of journalism with attendees of INMA’s recent Latin American conference.
In a world of fake news, truth becomes more scarce, which leads Blejman to wonder if synthetic content will lead to democracy itself becoming “synthetic”.
He pointed out how easy it is for AI to create different versions of the truth by exhibiting an actual New York Times page displaying the lead story of Donald Trump being found guilty of 34 felony counts from his hush-money trial with both real and AI-generated photos.
With that in mind, Blejman shared seven thoughts about how changes in AI will affect the way journalism is created 15 years from now.
AI is going to have its own power: Continuing research into human intelligence and how the human mind makes decisions will contribute to the ongoing development of AI.
- Public relations: How artificial intelligence is changing the face of PR
- Queen Lozikeyi singer preaches peace
- Public relations: How artificial intelligence is changing the face of PR
- Business opinion: Branding through Artificial Intelligence
Keep Reading
Journalists will need to keep up with these changes to be able to work accurately.
AI’s power will be increasingly responsive to human needs: Already, new AI is being developed to better recognise human emotions based on facial expression and new medical technology is being deployed so a person’s brain can move objects without using their limbs.
As this trend continues, we should expect a future where AI can anticipate our emotions and predict our responses and behaviour.
lThere will be new regulatory frameworks enacted, and they will vary around the world: Governments and corporations will continue to compete for control over AI.
Currently, countries have widely varying levels of regulation over AI, with China exercising complete control, Europe recently passing comprehensive regulations and the United States approach in flux.
This landscape will continue to fluctuate.
There will be different realities based on different information: Already, AI has almost unlimited capacity to generate credible fake images and people tend to believe what they want to believe.
Moving forward, this will lead to people having increasingly different beliefs about what is true.
Information will degrade: There will be a drastic decrease in the value of journalism as it currently exists in business models.
Already, newsrooms that employ journalists are closing and media companies are making deals with large language models to access their content, like the recent deal between Newscorp and OpenAI.
Programming will degrade: Similarly, decreases in the value of software programmers will lead to this work being performed more quickly but less well by AI.
The mediation of information will be transferred from humans to machines: Machines will cover news, information and analysis with less human intervention.
Already media companies are using AI to cover topics like weather forecasts and sports scores.
Another way to start thinking about the future, Blejman said, is to look back at the past 30 years and think about how the internet has changed journalism in that time and how the ways we produce and distribute news have become less centralised.
“The way the world is changing now is similar to what happened to journalism 30 years ago with advent of the internet.”
There are also lessons to be learned about the more immediate future, Blejman said.
In the next five years, expect to see people increasingly getting information directly from AI searches and less through curated news sites and platforms.
Bearing that in mind, he said, the media industry must be sure to protect our credibility, our communities and our data.
