The evidence is mounting that quality journalism only increases in value as AI eats itself and drowns in a sea of meaningless ‘slop’. The challenge, however, lies in convincing the audience just how we are different.
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It’s back to school and hopefully you’re looking back over a summer well spent. Personally at least. Professionally August is rarely the highlight of the publishing year. As the judiciary and politicians take time off the papers have always found themselves filling pages with nothing stories that wouldn’t normally get past a sub editor. In the UK’s news calendar August is called The Silly Season, a name that goes back to the 1860s. The Silly Season may be nothing new, but AI has added a whole new dimension.
My personal favourite this August was the story that Toyota had developed a car engine that runs on water, emits only water vapour, and completely turns the electric vehicle market upside down. It seems likely that this story was first a Facebook post, which then got picked up by MSN, quickly gained currency and was widely published. The AFP even went as far as publishing a rebuttal pointing out that it was false, and Forbes published an indignant article saying how ridiculous it was.
If you happen to follow my LinkedIn profile you’ll already know that my eye was caught by a Nieman Lab study that shows how making readers aware of AI fakes makes them gravitate towards quality journalism in response. Good news. While it’s unlikely that either the AFP’s journalists nor Forbes’ writers signed up to correct the silly season homework of what is likely to be AI content, at least those corrections help readers understand the value of quality content.
Now to the good news/bad news part of the story. Firstly if the future of quality journalism does involve correcting a lot of AI generated slop then at least we’re not going to be short of work. We’ve known about AI Boomer Traps for some time. But where Boomer Traps and water motor stories may just be slop traffic-generators, there is growing evidence that AI may be playing a growing, and growingly insidious way.
The latest NewsGuard False Claim monitor, published only a few days ago shows that AI false information claims have doubled over the last year. Scarily, where the top AI engines used to claim no knowledge of the more contentious details of breaking news, they now deliver assured, but fake or misleading information over a third of the time. The confidence and authority with which they do that means that it’s not just gullible boomers that are likely to be taken in.
So the good news is that there’s going to be no shortage of fake AI news to rebut. The really tricky bit is distinguishing ourselves from the very thing we are rebutting.
There is no shortage of experts urging news publishers to embrace AI, but we have to do so with clear heads and a lot of transparency. The AFP is undoubtedly right to point out fake news stories, and in the process highlight its own reputation, but the AFP also has a relationship with Mistral, which promises reliable information. Except that NewsGuard’s report finds Mistral sources Russian propaganda content written deliberately to appeal to AI and skew the news. If you’re still not reaching for a stiff drink about all this then don’t forget that NewsGuard, scourge of fake AI content, itself uses AI to help detect disinformation.
The tools are there to detect, the journalists are poised to debunk, but the challenge will be to ensure that readers really know who the good guys are in all of this.
For more insights and opinions on how media leaders are approaching the incorporation of AI in our newsrooms, take a moment to listen in on our Media Pioneers series of podcasts.
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- The Silly Season. Is the joke on us?
- Are you going to be replaced by a robot? More immediately, is that fear already loose in your newsroom?
- Touching base with the finest minds in the business
- “If you found digital transformation difficult, you’re not going to like what’s coming”
- Mistral, the mysterious
