There’s no avoiding AI these days, and there are plenty of reasons to be wary, but cheap and powerful AI is coming, and it could really breathe new life into legacy content. We’re not just talking automated tagging here; we’re talking about turning legacy archives into animated, all-singing, all-dancing content for today’s audiences.
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Even by the dizzying standards of AI disruption, this week has been breathless. Just as Paris briefly become “the artificial intelligence (AI) capital of the world” the launch of DeepSeek-R1 rocked the existing AI giants to their core. Within a couple of days the US incumbents were pointing fingers and claiming that DeepSeek had cheated by copying from them. Which is hilarious for those of us in news publishing since AI has been brazenly built by systematically using our content, something a few commentators have been quick to point out. Best of all was the possibility that after a year of seeing our own livelihoods threatened by AI, the advent of DeepSeek meant that potentially ChatGPT just lost its own job….to AI.
Too early for celebration, but definitely time to take a closer look
It’s too early for schadenfreude, sadly, but whatever the big AI players do next, the key disruption for us bystanders is that DeepSeek’s model is on offer to businesses at a fraction of the price of the established giants. Which makes developing and running specialised AI apps affordable for much smaller players.
For some this only risks accelerating the adoption of AI and the menaces that brings. Let’s not forget that the Paris Action Summit inspired not one, but three counter summits, such is the perceived threat of AI. Let’s also remember that inappropriate use of AI is viewed very badly indeed by those most important of people, our audience.
But where AI could genuinely help news publishers, without undermining audience confidence, threatening human jobs, or ignoring quality is revitalising our archives. We all refer to our archived publications as a wealth. The AI industry has used them to make millions. Finding the gems in the archives, let alone dusting them off and presenting them in new ways for new audiences should be just what AI can do for us. More affordable AI should in theory mean even smaller titles, or better yet partnerships among titles, could use the latest technology to find value in their hidden treasure troves.
So what can AI do for archives?
We know what you’re thinking – revitalising archives with AI is something that has been talked about for years; long before AI reached its current level of development. Back in 2022 the French Ministry of Culture was talking about AI bringing documents to life notably with the Socface project. Since then the marriage of optical character recognition with the power of AI has definitely brought new possibilities to archive retrieval including the ability to ‘read’ and resurface handwritten documents.
In most cases, however, the ‘revaluing’ of archives has largely meant newspapers selling access to their archives to the AI companies themselves, or the example of AFP and Mistral. Critics point out that this is an approach that is mostly of interest to larger publications and one that risks surrendering control. There’s a handy guide to who is signing, and who is suing from the Press Gazette in the UK. That doubt over whether to co-operate, or compete has led to some determined stances to go it alone and avoid the AI companies, such as Ouest-France working with the University of Rennes to do it for themselves.
Much of the focus on archives, however, is on the abilities of AI to identify content, making it easier to search (with natural language queries for example), and thereby resurface legacy material. AI tagging makes it possible index archives with a speed and detail that makes it much more realistic for hard-pressed journalists to interrogate an entire archive looking for very specific queries.
All singing, all dancing AI activated archives
But what if affordable AI meant we could go beyond that and give a really new life to archives by presenting long-form text articles in a new way for a new audience?
Take a look at this :
It’s a multimedia telling of a long form article created by Jaemark Tordecilla, for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). What’s remarkable is that this quality multimedia explanation of a sensitive subject started out as a long-form text story, and all the multimedia elements have been created using AI (and, of course, no small amount of talent from Jaemark). Only a few years ago the costs involved would have ruled this out for most news publishers. Now AI is making it possible and in the process dangling the huge prize of reinventing longform text articles from the archive as multimedia audio/video stories to appeal to a very different audience. Tools that turn photos into lineart (see illustration above), MidJourney for original text-prompted images, and a voiceover created using 11Elevenlabs transform the story. The ‘making of’ video from Jaemark explains the whole process and gives a pretty good idea of the time and the skillsets required (including the workarounds needed to correct AI limitations).
We’re not trying to gloss over the creativity required to do this right, but we’re not in the business of pushing to replace staff either. Instead it seems to us at Upgrade Media that this is precisely the kind of imaginative approach that can transform legacy content into new form journalism, for new audiences, all done by a single (talented) staff member where once an entire team would have been required.
Now that is bringing archives to life.
About Upgrade Media: Upgrade Media is a creative agency, strategy consultancy, training center and media transformation think tank, through its brand New World Encounters.
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