By: Margaret Simons / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com
The idea of serving the public has been embedded in the core of journalism - since the profession was created.
Whether it was quality news for citizen information, or sensations and gossip, newsrooms and editors always had in mind the desires and needs of audiences - noble or lowly.
But this relationship is changing in significant and dangerous ways - the most recent change in 50 years, a technology-driven disruption of our media and public life.
Let me explain.
If you use a search engine like Google, you may have noticed recently that when you search for information on a topic, you see a simple summary of the key facts at the top of the search results. There are links to more information if you want, but most people are happy with the summary.
That means fewer people are clicking on media sites to look for news. So far, the trend is small, but everyone expects it to grow. And that undermines media business models. Less visibility on a media organization’s website or app means fewer subscribers and fewer advertisers willing to pay to reach a shrinking audience.
Let's leave aside, for now, the issue of the accuracy of bot-generated summaries, because most of them are quite accurate. Gaffes are very embarrassing, sometimes dangerous, but also increasingly rare.
This is because AI [artificial intelligence] companies - Google, OpenAI and others - are signing agreements with media companies that allow them to use content written by journalists, including decades of media archives, to train and feed their robots.
Most major media companies have signed some kind of deal, and it's easy to see why. Media business models have been constantly strained, even disrupted, by successive waves of technological change.
The money being offered for licensing content to AI companies is almost irresistible. When everyone is doing it, who dares to be left behind?
Ethical media companies defend the deal with terms formulated to give them some control and protect their reputation.
But this may obscure the underlying mechanism - the rupture in the relationship between journalists and their audiences. The transfer of power from media brands to AI brands and their owners.
Artificial intelligence is so new and developing so rapidly that only fools would make any bold predictions. Maybe there's a bubble, and maybe it'll burst. Maybe in a few months, another model will emerge.
But, I fear that if current trends continue, media organizations could very quickly shift from a business-to-public model to a business-to-business model.
AI companies will intervene between the journalist and the audience.
Today, 22 percent of Australians pay for news, according to the University of Canberra's annual digital news report.
This suggests some brand loyalty. But 22 percent is nowhere near the majority. It used to be that most families bought a newspaper. Now, quality commercial media is no longer a “mass” business. It is a service for an elite.
Those who don’t pay get their information from free television (still important but rapidly declining), social media (still growing), or a host of free sources, including influencers, podcasters, and political partisans. Some people avoid news altogether. In this country, we can be grateful that free sources include public broadcasters, which are widely trusted and maintain standards of accuracy and impartiality.
Now, more than ever, quality media brands depend on relationships with their audiences for relevance and financial survival. And yet, in deals with AI companies, they may be trading off the very things that those relationships depend on.
Does it matter if journalists research and write content for use by AI businesses, rather than as a direct service to the public?
It matters a lot.
These are the risks:
First, the most obvious: if journalism does not serve the interests of those who control AI, content may not be published or may be distorted or censored. We already see this in some of the search results that appear from Grok-to Elon Musk.
Second, we lose one of the main benefits of accessing a media site, app, or channel. You learn about things you never even thought to be interested in, which are led in a pack by people exercising judgment.
An AI-dominated model, on the other hand, only answers questions about specific topics, or what it infers from your previous research. It doesn't care about you as a fellow citizen.
Third, if media companies lose their direct relationship with their audiences, they become more vulnerable to attack. How unlikely is it that the public will know or care, let alone mobilize to defend a media organization that has angered the government, if its information is consumed as part of a mix of sources?
And, will the sense of public duty and public purpose that still motivates the best newsrooms and journalists survive if the direct relationship with the audience is severed or weakened?
There is no point in pretending that change is not happening, or that it can be avoided. But the risks must be addressed.
Media organizations need to step up, protect their brand by providing quality content. They need to make content, including archives, easier to search. They need to offer subscribers their own internal Q&A bots. This is already happening in many media organizations, but perhaps not fast enough.
It is much easier, when budgets are tight, to transfer functionality to big technology, which further increases its dominance and control.
Perhaps the world's public broadcasters could collaborate to build their own AI engines, trained on fact-checked material and remaining in public hands.
Or, perhaps the audience will feel resentment towards the mixtures of AI and imitative voice.
Maybe people will appreciate it, and pay for the originality, the text, the depth. For the interviews and the observation and the testimony - which are the heart of journalism.
We must hope so.
The relationship between journalist and audience is essential for trust, for consistency, for the ability to draw attention to uncomfortable issues and unwanted news.
It is essential to the public's idea and the public interest.
We lose it at our peril. /Telegraph/
