Generating news, generating change
When ChatGPT hit the world in November last year, we realised at once that it was a harbinger of significant change in the media industry. Generative AI has, accordingly, been one of our focal points at CMT in 2023. This week, we published a report on generative AI in the Australian news industry, looking at how it’s being used, where the opportunities lie, and the potential downsides. Based on a series of interviews with Australian newsrooms, including the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian Australia, the Daily Mail, SBS, Southern Cross Austereo, the Newcastle Herald and Australian Community Media, the report places our findings in a global context gleaned from a widescale review of international research work and regulatory developments.
Our findings indicate that newsrooms are experimenting cautiously with the technology. They see a strong upside for news production, particularly through the automation of menial tasks that have arisen with the shift to multiplatform news delivery. Personalised news content and distribution is another perceived opportunity, and there are likely to be significant changes in news distribution as the technology continues to mature.
However, newsrooms are wary of the significant downside of generative AI if problems of accuracy, authenticity and bias are not adequately dealt with, and many fear a potential flood of misinformation and manipulated media. All newsrooms we spoke with had, at least for the moment, decided not to use generative AI to produce editorial content, with experimentation mainly limited to back-end tasks. Both transparency and human oversight are seen as critical to maintaining the integrity of news, and concomitantly audience trust, and many saw a clear opportunity for quality news and trusted brands to stand out in an increasingly polluted information environment.
While no newsrooms thought generative AI was about to replace journalists, all see significant industry change on the horizon. Some are concerned about developing reliance on another wave of multinational tech companies, with several having blocked AI scrapers in reaction to the use of their news archives to train AI systems without recompense.
Overall, the Australian news industry is taking steps, if tentatively, to ready itself for the rise of generative AI. What newsrooms can do to prepare is of course limited by available resources, and smaller newsrooms in particular feel that the opportunity for automation to free up their small stables of journalists for reporting may be hindered by a lack of resources to effectively and safely implement the new technology.
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow
