• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 25, 2024

Editors and publishers are trying to figure out how to adopt and, if necessary, fight AI in their newsrooms.  

But that’s a tough assignment, judging by Journalism Needs Better Representation to Counter AI, a new paper from the Brookings AI Equity Lab. 

In July, Brookings AI Equity Lab convened content stewards and technologists to assess the impact of AI. Here are some of the difficulties they discussed: 

• Language translation is still limited, restricting full use by journalists, content creators and consumers. The large-language models that exist are mostly created for English-speaking audiences. 
• Use of generative AI in storytelling is not being equally pursued by many journalists. Those in large newsrooms, like those of Associated Press and News Corp., have access to training in AI fluency. But this is not the case in smaller organizations and more diverse media. 
• Gaps exist in professional development of journalists. This is largely due to limited newsroom resources. Moreover, few journalists are data scientists and lack the background to understand developments in AI. 
• Diverse journalists often lack the resources or support they need and may not have their experiences included in AI systems. The solution would be to have “more consortiums and collaborations for devising less disruptive business models to support Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ journalists who struggle to maintain both voice and presence in a highly digitized media landscape,” the study notes. 
• Journalists and consumers alike need AI literacy and fluency. AI must be formally introduced into both communities “with some level of transparency and awareness of the provenance of digital content—in terms of who wrote the relevant training data and whether the content is from an AI or a human—while recognizing that there is no single approach to doing so,” the study adds. 

The authors, Nicol Turner Lee and Courtney C. Radsch, write, “Some opportunities have supported interview transcription, data analysis and automated drafting, while threats include the homogenization of narratives, the spread of misinformation, and further reliance of newsrooms on Big Tech companies.”