Press freedom means controlling the language of AI
Source: Nieman Lab
-Generative AI systems act like “stochastic parrots,” using statistical models to guess word orders and pixel placements. That’s incompatible with a free press that commands its own words.
By MIKE ANANNY and JAKE KARR @ananny Sept. 27, 2023, 11:59 a.m.
Generative AI poses the biggest threat to press freedom in decades, and journalists should act quickly to organize themselves and radically reshape its power to produce news.
The news industry has long been buffeted by economic and technological challenges beyond its control. From early innovations in moveable type and photo reproduction to more recent concerns about search engine rankings, social media algorithms, audience analytics, pulled tech funding, and the infamous “pivot to video,” news organizations have tried to adapt to rapidly evolving information ecosystems, following the power and money of new technologies while simultaneously trying to make them align with news values and editorial judgments. The press today is dependent on distributed, technological infrastructures owned and operated by a select few powerful corporations.
And now along comes GenAI, threatening to upend industries. Teachers are questioning the value of essay assignments, doctors are using GenAI to communicate with patients, and Hollywood actors and writers are mounting vigorous defenses against studios aiming to use GenAI to create scripts, capture actors’ likenesses, and synthetically generate films.
Journalism, too, is trying to understand and harness GenAI’s power. There are countless experiments to computationally fabricate headlines, stories, images, videos, podcasts, broadcast personalities, and even interviews through easy-to-use off-the-shelf technologies that until recently were the stuff of industry prototypes and computer science labs. Though newsrooms have used some version of AI for years — to craft simple stories, search archives, test headlines, and analyze audience data — and journalists have developed forensic fact-checking routines to guard against fake media, today’s journalists are also rapidly experimenting with synthetic media tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALLE, Jasper.ai, Google’s Genesis prototype, and countless other competitors.
