Revolutionizing Journalism: The Rise of AI in Newsroom Innovation
Some takeaways from the Africa Bloomberg Media Innovators event I attended in Cape Town. Great insights to consider if you're trying to navigate AI.
What an awesome conference and conversations we had in Cape Town amid some leading thinkers on media and its current and future state.
The consideration I make when considering the value of integrating AI in newsrooms, PR shops, or corporate comms is about efficiency and transparency. There are many tools being developed at mind-blowing speed that can create new paradigms in our workflow. There are some of the ones I've been testing and using.
- Prompting Chat GPT for mediocre baselines that serve as a starting point.
- Midjourney and stable diffusion for image generation.
- In fact Adobe firefly is another tool i'm pretty impressed with on image generation and the ease of editing from it.
- ElevenLabs has just come up with a turbo version that's got me thinking about audio in a whole new way, and that the machine can create podcasts or audio plays in various languages, with me simply working at my lap top.
- Runway Gen 2 for text to video is pretty good and pretty expensive, so a little more inaccessible.
At the conference, I liked the emphasis on caution with AI, on testing things slowly, receiving internal and external feedback in offices and newsrooms, and on being part of a new journey that's transformative. Reinforced by the head of Bloomberg's innovation lab were the following points.
- When you've used an LLM or any AI, it's imperative to share that info with your audience. PS. There was a BOT involved.
- Think of what can be semi-automated or fully automated.
- What intelligent tools can be harnessed in this process?
- How can you solve your problem with a prediction model?
- What repeated tasks can be replaced, and what new tasks can be augmented by a machine.
Some key warnings:
- AI lacks judgement
- AI makes up plausible facts
- AI does not attribute well.
- Gender bias and other bias depending on the data set it has received.
- AI can not generate context.
- The regulatory environment is not up to speed and it's hard to keep up with developers
- Local language challenges
So humans with judgement, context and knowledge are needed ... but require new skills sets to support the changing media and tech environments.
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