Some of the largest news publishers of the world such as Reuters and Washington Post have started using artificial intelligence to augment their newsrooms.
Common benefits of using artificial intelligence in journalism are:
1) It can increase the productivity of the journalists by enabling automation of repetitive and mundane work
2) Artificial Intelligence can streamline media workflows
3) Using artificial intelligence, content can be quickly correlated
4) Artificial intelligence can reduce fake news
5) Artificial Intelligence enables faster research
As per a report by the New York Times, Bloomberg News uses the Cyborg system which helps the reporters in making thousands of articles. The system splits up the financial report. It converts them into a news story, complete with facts and figures.
Here are some artificial Intelligence use-cases which shows its impact on modern journalism:
Automated journalism using Heliograf software – Washington Post
In 2016, the Washington Post used the Heliograf software to write a news story for the Rio Olympics. It first analyzes the data, matches the phrases to the relevant story template and creates an automatic narration. This narration can be published on different platforms. It can easily find data anomalies.
It increases the productivity of the journalist by creating real-time content. It also saves time to focus on a more difficult job.
Automated journalisms started with fields like sports and finance which are more data-grounded domains. In these domains, raw data can be easily converted into a coherent story.
Data visualization by Reuters
It is known that Reuters has partnered with Graphiq. Reuters uses data visualization techniques for sports, news and entertainment topics. This is a new way of publishing visually stimulating, easy to understand data-driven news. Graphiq uses algorithms to constantly create, update and access data.
NewsWhip Analytics by Associated Press
In 2013, the Associated Press started using AI for its sports news content and earning reports. It uses NewsWhip analytics to keep ahead of trends on social media.
The main features of NewsWhip are:
- User engagement
- To identify influencers affecting brand performance
- To benchmark competitors for all social media platforms
- Increase data accuracy and minimizes the data errors
Semantic discovery and comment monitoring by New York Times
The New York Times started to use an AI Editor to simplify the journalistic process. The journalist can now use tags or main points of the content while writing an article. The editor learns to recognize these tags and an important part of the article. It can help search a huge amount of data in real-time and extract information based on people, location, dates and events. The tool makes journalism work easy and fast by simplifying the research work and providing fast and accurate checks.
The New York Times uses AI to eliminate moderation of comments manually.
Chatbot media interfaces by Quartz Digital News
Quartz Digital News initially used BotStudio for news interface that gave the feel of chat systems. Users could ask queries about events, people, places or news and the system gives back the relevant content. This is still in the experimental stage. It aims to build bots and use the AI interface for all media platforms.
Semantic discovery from BBC News Labs
BBC has voluminous amount of data from daily news, features and videos. The tool watches RSS feeds, extracts and news articles from BBC and other global news outlets. It gives tags to the relevant stories and categorizes them into four parts: locations, people, organizations and things.
At present artificial Intelligence is used in journalism to save money & time, and increase speed & efficiency. Artificial intelligence is impacting current journalism by automating routine reporting, providing faster insights and lowering barriers to entry. There are technical challenges, such as, understanding unstructured data like a human, lack of self-awareness, etc.. There are also governance challenges such as corporate accountability, copyright and fair use. The future of artificial intelligence in journalism would be decided by how the technology overcomes all these barriers!!
