Since the last Flashes & Flames piece on AI, perhaps the biggest AI story of the year broke. Sam Altman, founder and CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI was ousted by his board, before making a rapid return once more than half the company, various investors and quite a lot of industry watchers created an uproar.
That raised some big questions about the future of AI, in particular the battle over how it will be deployed safely and, relatedly, monetised. Those questions, however, are very much about the future of how those who currently own the technology will develop it. For media, the question is much more about how we will adapt to, and harness, what the tech companies create.
This week, two new reports look at the immediate future for those media businesses hoping to navigate an AI revolution. One is the annual future report from Schibsted, the Norway-based media group, which examines various emerging trends and technologies and this year, unsurprisingly, focuses heavily on the opportunities and risks of AI. Also unsurprisingly, it acts as a bit of PR for the firm. But, as always, Schibsted’s industry-leading approach to digital transformation makes it worth paying attention to. The second report is “Changing Newsrooms” from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which, again unsurprisingly, also has a focus on AI although, in this case, zeroing in on how newsrooms are actually dealing with it. Here are some takeaways from the reports:
How much change is coming?
In Schibsted’s report, strategy advisor Ian Vännman makes the obvious comparison between AI and the internet: “The advent of the internet drastically reduced distribution costs in the news media, triggering substantial shifts in how content reached consumers and removing most barriers to entry into the market. Now, as we usher in the era of AI, we stand on the precipice of another profound change: a potential collapse in content creation costs.”
That comparison is apposite, not just because of the potential scale of change, but also because so many at the time didn’t see quite how big a deal it would become. Things are, thankfully looking a bit different now, though perhaps not as different as you might expect.
The Reuters report asked newsroom leaders the fundamental question of how AI overall would impact their work and found an interesting split. Of the 129 senior executives surveyed, 74% said that “generative AI will help us do some things more efficiently but the essence of what we do won’t change”, with 21% saying “generative AI will transform workflows and processes, fundamentally changing every role in the newsroom”.
It’s always hard, when presented with surveys based on statements that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with, to unpick exactly what people are actually thinking. In this case, I think there shouldn’t be a dichotomy between the “essence” of what makes media, and a full-on change in processes and newsroom roles. Both can be true at the same time. Stories, audio and film may remain largely reported, written and edited by humans. But that doesn’t mean AI won’t have a transformative effect across every part of the ways those roles are done, the structure of newsrooms or the way that work is monetised.
However, it is at least reassuring that just 2% said it would not change anything much. I bet if you’d asked a similar question about digital back at the start of the century, the proportion shrugging off a transformative technology (even if we can debate whether AI will be quite as big a disruption as the internet) would have been a lot bigger…
A culture of experimentation
Most media organisations have at least realised that avoiding AI is not going to be an option. Both the threats and the opportunities will be ignored at their peril. But many are also only just emerging from, if not still grappling with, the whole digital thing. Throwing something else potentially transformative into the mix is obviously going to be a bit triggering, and tricky.
However, there does appear to be some consensus emerging about early best practice, which is apparent in Schibsted’s approach, as outlined by Verdens’ Gang publisher Gard Steiro: “All media houses in Schibsted appointed AI-responsible personnel. Several teams are collaborating across the board and sharing experiences. We have hired a coordinator with substantial technological and journalistic experience to lead the work. One of the goals is to identify potential new needs and steps in the editorial workflow and recommend the next actions for tooling development. The significant change, however, is not about building tools but creating a culture for experimenting with generative AI throughout the organisation.”
I’d argue that this approach has learned a lot from adapting to digital and, particularly. the mistakes many made when trying to do so. You can’t leave it up to those running the day-to-day to get up to speed and implement new ideas in a technology, but equally you can’t let them just remain insulated from attempts to work with it. That means having teams tasked with knowing what’s possible, and what could go wrong, but also ensuring that their work permeates the rest of the business.
One worry from the Reuters report, however, is thatonly 16% of the 130 or so senior newsroom leaders said that they already had a person responsible for editorial leadership of AI, and 29% said their organisations weren’t even considering it…
Are we ready?
We maybe should have thought a bit more carefully about the dangers, moral and business, of the internet revolution. But, when it comes to AI, the catastrophising about super intelligences deciding they don’t want humans around has put ethical concerns front and centre.
When it comes to whether news media are ready for that, the picture according to Reuters is mixed. Just over a third said their organisations were working on high-level principles for AI, while another 29% said they already have some in place. Another fifth said they were considering them. However, just 16% said they had detailed guidelines for using AI in different circumstances, with another 35% saying they were working on them and 30% saying they were considering them.
Embracing AI, and getting expertise to flow through an organisation, is clearly pressing if media organisations don’t want to be left behind. But that speed needs to be secured with carefully thought out rules for what and what not to do. Those detailed guidelines are even more important if newsrooms are going to take a distributed approach to using AI in different roles and areas of their business.
History repeating?
One thing both these illuminating reports share is a desire by media organisations to avoid some of the mistakes made when digital first came along. That is undeniably a good thing. The importance of company culture to ensuring a media business can adapt to technological change is now pretty much undisputed. But it was a lesson learned the hard way over the first two decades of the 21st Century. Those who made the mistake of judging the web to be a passing fad, presumably, won’t be fooled again.
Now, with AI, the challenge is less about waking up to the opportunities and threats on offer. It’s much more about finding the right balance between disseminating it through media organisations in an effective way, and having the right guard-rails in place to ensure enthusiasm doesn’t go places that could fatally undermine business models, and indeed the reason media exists as a business in the first place. At least, this time around, increasing numbers of people really are trying to work out where that balance should be.
