Overview

Journalism faces a decline of traditional business models. News leaders are increasingly pressured to reorient toward data-driven logics.  Many news organisations now bet big on AI investments, hoping that the technology can generate additional revenue or free up staff time.

But problems emerge: Some journalists fear being replaced with AI; There are possible frictions between journalistic values and the values encoded into AI systems and infrastructures; Little is known about the impact of AI on the news and the health of our public discourse. AI also poses the risk of making news organisations even more reliant on the technology and platforms companies that dominate in AI development—potentially aggravating the economic problems that news organisations face.

The aim of this project is to identify key issues in this space and start a conversation among academic and industry leaders about those issues. These include:

1. How news organisations and journalists negotiate these tensions,
2. How they accommodate or resist the dominance of the technology sector in this space, and
3. What are the potential long-term implications of these developments for the news industry and our information ecosystems—and thus public discourse—at large.

This project will begin providing answers and recommendations how AI might be used and regulated in the news to the benefit of journalists, news organisations, and the public and point out key risks following from the adoption of AI in the news.