Artificial intelligence offers multiple opportunities to transform the journalism profession through a range of innovative features.
In general, AI is not crucial to content generation as such, the final drafting of which is always the journalist’s job. Instead, artificial intelligence can provide a range of services to simplify onerous research, analysis, and synthesis tasks, and open up new opportunities impractical to date.
Automated content generation can sketch basic articles, such as field day reports, financial updates, and weather news, by analyzing large amounts of available information and presenting it in a readable format. It remains critical that for each piece of information the source is clear. The writing of the article is thus facilitated, but the journalist’s hand is always crucial in giving it personality.
Automated Fact-Checking solutions can help verify the accuracy of statements made by politicians or other sources in real time by comparing them with pre-existing databases. Similar solutions can identify fake or deep fake content generated by artificial intelligence. These tools are key to strengthening the role of the journalist as a demystifier, both of the real world and the artificial world, in a scenario where discriminating true and false will become increasingly challenging and important.
AI can contribute to data analysis and visualization: it can analyze large amounts of data to identify hidden trends or phenomena and translate them into appealing graphs or visualizations. In this sense, artificial intelligence is not applied to create information, but to synthesize and visualize it.
News management platforms can use AI to tailor articles and videos to users’ interests and behavior. For example, it is possible to decline the same content for the elderly or for children by changing the language, or remove offensive elements for members of a religion or culture. AI can provide style suggestions, help with catchy headlines or particular expressions in the narrative of an article.
AI-based translation tools allow content to be made accessible in different languages, increasing global audiences. These tools open international markets to the journalist, especially when supported by personalization tools that can not only translate, but also localize the content for a specific country.
AI can analyze social media for trending topics and audience behaviors, helping journalists discover emerging stories. The social universe is a goldmine of information, but much of it is of poor quality and relevance. An agent trained by the journalist can assist him and navigate the social networks for him to extract information of interest.
AI-powered chatbots can answer audience questions, provide updates on ongoing stories, or guide users to relevant articles. The chatbot does not replace the journalist, but acts as a conversational front end to the audience. However, it does not have to answer instead; instead, it can direct questions to pre-existing original content in the editor’s database.
Video editing and production solutions are spreading rapidly. AI can automate video production and editing by selecting highlights and adding subtitles or visual effects. Of course, a clear distinction must be made between original footage and AI-generated sequences, i.e., original documents and synthetic scenes. Documentation of a fact should always favor actual footage. Synthetically generated videos can be used for virtual reconstructions, stated, or conceptual representations.
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