ABC has flagged a shift in its position on generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in its news production. Despite previous caution, a recent deal with U.S. tech company Anthropic has opened the door for ABC staff to bring Claude AI into their broadcasting news work.
For now, the scope of this inclusion is limited to about 100 employees. However, ABC has signaled a willingness to expand this scope to include other tasks. The broadcaster will also hire specialists to help with AI adoption.
The broadcaster is also piloting the conversion of regional radio bulletins into articles with its own AI tool developed by ABC.
The goal is to free up time for staff to engage in other core journalistic work, such as investigations, while also expanding ABC’s production capabilities.
Australians have a distinctive distrust of AI tools, so it remains to be seen how the public will react to this change. On the other hand, the decision tracks with a long history of editors and journalists being early adopters of tech innovations.
Journalists already use various data tools. And it’s possible to use generative AI to augment journalistic work in valuable and unprecedented ways.
However, this comes at a time when journalism faces crises of sustainability for journalists and news — problems AI can as easily exacerbate as remedy.
The original tech-heads?
Journalists and news producers have long had not only a vested interest in innovations that might improve their busy workflows, but also a broad curiosity about the cutting edge of tools and technologies.
Generative AI in chatbot form has only made headlines in the past three years. But journalists have saved time by using automated systems and “robo-writing” to convert data into simple news stories for over a decade. In one 2016 study, readers even rated computer-written articles as “more credible and higher in journalistic expertise”.
Nevertheless, with rampant tech adoption also come concerns that some innovations are more disruptive than beneficial.
For example, social media and analytics introduced the almighty algorithm as an unwelcome additional editor to journalists’ work, undermining their autonomy.
Generative AI introduces a new threat that raises existential concerns for the sustainability of news.
Disrupting and displacing journalism
Journalists are more worried about generative AI than they were with other automated tools in the past — because chatbots can seemingly write just like a human can. In response, they’ve been emphasizing their indispensable role as gatekeepers who convey news to the public.
So if organizations choose to use AI to help produce journalism, a key question is how to handle ethics and concerns over quality. Time-poor professionals in fields from law to medicine have found themselves burned when their generative AI went off-script and crafted plausible fictions.
This potentially raises a bigger threat for journalists. The profession is already facing a crisis of public mistrust, including in Australia. Relying on AI for content generation opens the door to missteps that news producers like ABC can ill afford.
But these risks can be mitigated if newsrooms dedicate additional effort to verifying and curating the AI content. This makes journalists’ roles as gatekeepers more important than ever. Yet it also relies on audiences having a relationship with journalists and appreciating their judgment and analysis in the first place.
These efforts represent a new kind of work, one that shifts the lens away from the forms of production that have long been central to journalism.
A space of opportunities
Conversely, the latest AI tools do offer journalists new ways to augment their work. The large language models and other AI tools the public uses to generate office emails or funny cat pictures have been used by journalists globally to engage in unprecedented investigations and news production.
BBC’s in-depth coverage of Russia’s presence in Ukraine leveraged AI to dig through troves of text and video. This provided insights that would have been impractical or impossible to achieve through manual methods.
Global South news producers have used AI to overcome endemic resourcing challenges. They’ve been able to repurpose and translate content, extending the capacities of already stretched news reporters.
Generative AI can save time. Using AI tools for routine news production can make room for journalists to improve their relationships with audiences, focus on quality, and make a stronger case for journalism’s distinctive value.
Displacing journalists or displacing journalism?
These changes at ABC are coming at a time when funding and resources for journalism are becoming increasingly scarce. The business models that have long underpinned our media system were rendered unsustainable by big tech, while Australian news organizations are having to compete with overabundant online media from across the world.
AI tools bring potential for further displacement. AI summaries served by search engines summarise news content instead of directing online traffic to the original news source.
Additionally, AI-generated news obscures Australian media outlets or redirects users to larger international news organizations — particularly those in the U.S. Newsrooms are weighing their options on how to best use AI, even as they strategize how to compete with it as a source for news.
ABC’s goals for using AI in their news work fit a long-established historical trend toward keeping journalism on the cutting edge of what technological innovations can offer.
The efficiency gains and expanded capabilities for journalism are real, and audiences can appreciate its outputs even as they distrust the technology itself.
The question remains whether ABC can channel AI into benefits for the public in a way that does not sacrifice their commitment to news quality or the public’s esteem for the public broadcaster.
Correction: this article was updated to clarify that Claude AI is not being used for converting radio bulletins to text, but instead, the ABC uses its own AI tool for this pilot.
Timothy Koskie, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Media and Communications, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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