Is Journalism Ready to Survive AI? – Brand Wagon News

The world continues to be fascinated by the emergence of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), yet the benefits and drawbacks it brings are yet to be understood. Initially, AI was thought to automate many of the manual tasks performed in various sectors, impacting the jobs of blue-collar workers, but the recent wave of advanced generative AI systems such as DALL-E, Lensa AI, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, Poe, Bard, etc. have raised concerns about their potential disruption to white-collar jobs in the media. Moreover, fears of piracy and abuse have emerged in the publishing industry. Interestingly, at the same time, AI is expected to reduce the operational costs of newsrooms.

Over the past 20 years, America has lost two-thirds of its newspaper jobs.These are jobs that AI can't handle, according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research organization.

The report further noted that in the last year alone, the U.S. journalism industry 2,700 jobs were cut and an average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week. “Over the past decade, traffic to the top 46 news sites has increased 43 percent, yet revenues have fallen 56 percent. A handful of privately held tech companies based in Silicon Valley dominate the digital advertising market.“Media, publishing, audiences, data, cloud and search have disrupted journalism business models around the world, and now AI is doing it again,” said Courtney C. Radosh, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Technology and Governance Studies. Innovay Oz, director of the Open Market Institute at the Center for Journalism and Liberty, said in the report:

The New York Times Company's December 2023 lawsuit against Microsoft And OpenAI is proving to be a visionary, clearly indicating that the future depends on copyright laws, licensing agreements, and a high degree of collaboration between content creators and technology innovators. Indeed, Gen AI has created ways to achieve sustainability and new approaches to news product processes, from creating summaries and newsletters and covering local events (with mixed results) to pitching stories and moderating comment sections. This also means that content assisted by or created by Gen AI itself could lead to growing copyright concerns.

Industry experts believe journalism is moving toward a more symbiotic relationship with Gen AI. While technology can automate many tasks and many tools can help upskill journalists, it takes reporters with courage, integrity, ambition, and human creativity to create stories that allow free markets, free speech, and freedom to thrive. During a congressional hearing on “AI Oversight: The Future of Journalism” in January, Roger Lynch, CEO of magazine publisher Condé Nast, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law that Gen AI cannot replace journalism. “Without journalism, the information ecosystem that enables the benefits of Gen AI (and likely brings billions of dollars to investors) will collapse. This is because Gen AI's large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on copyrighted content created by humans,” he said.

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