Musings III - Journalistic Futures.

Rants and Opinions that deserve more than a 140 character response and deeper reflection.

New Sense in the City Podcast

Designed as an ‘evergreen’ multi-sensory guide to the city, the podcast is the first step to a multi-channel augmented reality journey through the times, spaces and characters of the city…

What started out as a guidebook for Paris has become a series of podcasts taking a closer look at cities like Athens, Greece and Sydney, Australia.

Now Melbourne Australia will get the Sense in the City treatment, and the podcast will be hosted by… me.

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and went to the University of Melbourne in the early 90’s. It was a different place back then. But like many cities around the world, the more things change the more they stay the same and it’s okay to be nostalgic and remember the past as well as embrace the changes. I’m looking forward to sharing the familiar and the novel stories.

AI and the Future of Journalism

One of the reasons I started this newsletter is to curate information and content that I deem relevant and interesting. Generative AI with access to the internet has the ability to construct relatively complicated ‘articles’ on a wide variety of subjects, but does that spell the end for journalists?

Maybe. If the job is to troll existing sources and summarise them, then an AI like ChatGPT can do that. These large language models are beginning to cite their sources which in many cases is existing media and articles created by journalists.

As far as I know, there is not an AI White House correspondent or an AI reporter on the front line of the war between Russia and Ukraine. An AI could ‘listen’ to a live commentary of an AFL football game and write a match report, but this is still a form of plagiarism.

The ‘Media’ has an image and a trust problem. Perhaps articles written by an ‘objective’ AI could help to change that. Or, maybe trusted news sources with a reputation for good journalism will be able to command a premium by continuing to create original content.

Domain experience is still important though. The accuracy and bias of AI models means that an editor is still required to check for inaccuracy, ‘hallucinations’ and deep fakes.

Last week, a fake photo of a fictional explosion at the Pentagon is said to have ‘wiped millions of dollars off the stock exchange.’

Some say that AI will lead to job losses. Any trader or journalist who acted on a single unverified photo should be sacked.

The image is supposed to be generated by AI and gave the pundits an opportunity to cry for watermarks to be baked into all generative AI content, but anyone with access to Photoshop could have created this image 25 years ago.

The deeper issue is that we have become so accustomed to reacting instantaneously to information on social media that the stock market can be affected to the tune of ‘$500 billion’ without anyone checking if the story is real.

So as with many things to do with AI, the rich will become richer. Media brands that have established trust will maintain an audience in the face of AI content factories.

But how can that content be protected?

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. US Copyright Office

If the Australian media can pressure social media networks to pay to distribute content, then companies like OpenAI might come under pressure to compensate the copyright owners.

Which raises some interesting questions. Is ChatGPT at fault for scraping the internet and repackaging the information in response to a prompt or is the person who wrote the prompt the one who is liable for copyright infringement?

Is the intent of the prompt writer the thing we need to look at?

Nobody is going to care if ChatGPT rewrites the recipe for a poached egg, but passing yourself off as a rare-earth mineral expert based on other people’s work is a different story.

Blockchain could be the answer. Some media outlets are already selling articles as NFTs. Of course, just because something is recorded in an immutable ledger doesn’t mean it is factually correct, but it could establish the authorship and date of a piece of work.