David Caswell emphasises that AI may be the news industries’ best opportunity to adapt to the digital age.
For journalism, 2024 may seem to be the worst of times. The news industry in recent decades has been subjected to withering competition for audience attention from the internet and social media, losing relevance as a privileged source of information and facing increasing distrust and even avoidance from significant portions of the population. To add to these woes, in comes AI, which seems to accelerate these downward trends.
Surprisingly, however, many in the news industry are approaching AI with a different attitude – optimism. There is a sense that, with sufficient ambition and investment, AI-augmented news might be the last, best chance to fundamentally remake journalism for the digital age.
News simply has not been working for many people in the UK for a while. Only 37% trust the media, and only 9% are willing to pay for news online, according to surveys by Edelman and the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. The proportion of people in the UK who said they were very interested in news declined from 70% to just 43% between 2015 and 2023, and 41% now say they actively avoid news. This dissatisfaction is not spread evenly across the public, but is concentrated in less prosperous and less educated communities located outside of metropolitan centres. Avoiding the News, a recently published book from researchers at the Reuters Institute, describes how these people see news as “not simply irrelevant or of little use, but also fundamentally uninterested in people like them.”
AI, and in particular large language models like ChatGPT, provide new opportunities to change these people’s relationship with news by dramatically improving both its relevance and its accessibility. AI will soon be able to read, listen to and watch previously unimaginable quantities of source material, as well as analyse, compare, assess, synthesise, contextualise and summarise those sources to fit the information needs and wants of diverse news consumers. These abilities could ensure that news coverage is applied comprehensively rather than at the discretion of individual journalists. They could substantially broaden the criteria for what is considered ‘news’ and might enable far richer coverage of local, regional, culturally distinct, community-based, practically-oriented or otherwise relatable forms of information. If applied at sufficient scale, such tools could essentially make all public information easily available to all of the public, removing the substantial friction of finding, evaluating and interpreting documents obtained from search or websites.
AI can also make news much more accessible to many more people. News providers must often make assumptions about how their customers consume information, requiring a comfort with long text articles, an acceptance of formal style, a knowledge of uncommon terms and substantial background knowledge of the subject matter. AI can free news consumers from these requirements by ‘re-mediating’ news into almost any medium, format, style and tone that can be imagined. Further, AI can adjust the assumed context required to consume news, providing more for those who need it, or less for those who already have it. News can therefore adapt to the needs of individual consumers and the situations in which they consume news. AI-augmented news can provide people who have been ill-served by current news products with a ‘new deal’ for news that is both deeply relevant to their lives and interests as well as effortlessly accessible.
It is worthwhile to consider what universally relevant and broadly accessible news might mean for the UK. It might offer radical transparency, not only of government but also of society generally, enabling feedback loops that promote efficiency and consensus. It could substantially diminish information bias, bursting the Westminster bubble and empowering regions and under-represented communities. It could make our politics more rational, evidence-based and pragmatic, revealing the underlying trade-offs and complexity of issues. It might even create an export sector centred on AI-augmented news services, including editing, fact-checking, workflows and media-related data. Expanding the relevance and accessibility of news with automation will not happen overnight. Realising such a vision might require new ways of earning trust in an AI-mediated information environment, new journalistic cultures and new oversight processes. t Ambition and creativity must be matched with thoughtful investment in technology, publishing infrastructure, new editorial workflows and training.
As home to the world’s second largest concentration of AI innovation and half of its top news brands, the UK is well-placed to become a global leader in AI-augmented journalism. Other countries, including Germany and the Nordics, are aggressively investing in AI-augmented media and so the UK’s current advantages are no guarantee of future success. While it is true that service-based industries such as journalism may be disproportionately challenged by the automation of cognitive tasks, the time is right for these industries to fundamentally reinvent themselves using these tools. A service-based economy, like the UK, has a special incentive to invest and lead in the application of AI to services. This applies to journalism as much as other fields.
Besides opportunity, AI also poses very real risks for news, including the possibility of substantial degradation of our information ecosystem due to AI-empowered disinformation and threats to the ability of news producers to fund original journalism. However, AI is likely going to reshape our information landscape whether we like it or not. Directing how that transformation plays out will require us to seize the opportunities as well as mitigate the risks. That requires the imagination to create a new vision of what news might become in an AI world and the ambition to strive for an equitable and empowering information environment. If we can do that, then 2024 may actually be the best of times for news.
David Caswell is the former Executive Product Manager at BBC News.
This article was published in the latest edition of Centre Write. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.
Read more from our June 2024 Centre Write magazine, ‘Generation AI?’ here.