Speakers: Charlie Beckett, Head of the Polis – LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science) Journalism and AI research project and David Dieudonné, News Lab Lead at Google / Intervenants: Charlie Beckett, directeur du projet de recherche Journalisme et IA à la LSE et David Dieudonné, directeur de News Lab Google
« One thing I want to impress upon you today is how various and complex a range of technologies these are, » Charlie Beckett told the audience when he presented the newly released Journalism AI report, drafted in collaboration between LSE and Google.
The report looks at how newsrooms around the world can look to artificial intelligence tools in order to enhance their reporting by surveying journalists. Today, only about 71 news organizations from 32 countries—concentrated in North America—are using AI technologies.
« The idea is not to bring in the robots and sack all the human beings, » Beckett joked, but to augment the powers of journalists and turbocharge what news organizations are already doing.
Although a lot of optimism and curiosity exists in newsrooms about AI, few have clear strategies about integrating it into their work. Using AI raises a number of practical and ethical questions: from new skills journalists would have to learn in order to use it, to financial resources needed to bring AI to the newsroom, to the questions of algorithmic bias.