media update’s Aisling McCarthy takes a look at how AI and the media are working together, and what they can achieve.

With terms like ‘AI’ and ‘machine learning’ becoming ubiquitous, it's clear than the integration of humans and machines has become inevitable. These technologies have stepped into almost every industry – and are ultimately, changing the game.

Numerous major publishers, including Los Angeles Times and Associated Press in America, have announced that machine learning-powered algorithms will be responsible for some of their journalistic reporting. However, this does not mean that journalists will be out of their jobs, but rather that their jobs will change.

AI algorithms will also be able to analyse social media, search trends, and location-specific data in order to find new stories, allowing human journalists to write more in-depth articles, including analysis, opinion, and humorous pieces.

“AI algorithms will be able to analyse social media…allowing humans journalists to write more in-depth articles.”
Will Oremus, senior technology writer at Slate, explained that the LA Times used their “Quakebot” to tweet out news about an earthquake – within three minutes of it happening.

“The bot is in place not to replace real, live journalists, but to make it easier to release quick information about emergency situations,” Oremus said.

The introduction of AI into the newsroom offers journalists various opportunities to tell stories, which previously may have been out of reach. The use of AI algorithms can be useful to discover trends in data far quicker that humans could, and, in some cases, see connections that humans never would have.

This means that AI can do data analysis at high speeds, leaving humans to check the facts churned out by algorithms. Algorithms are also able to identify outliers in data, giving human journalists the opportunity to investigate why those data points fall outside of the norm.

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The development of AI has caused many people to fear losing their jobs to machines. Find out the truth about this in our article, Three myths about AI busted.