4.0 | general

Journalism is not facts.

Journalism lives on facts and lives to publish the relevant ones. But journalism is not a selection of facts. A selection of facts, if arranged in a certain way, could be an encyclopedia. Journalism is not an encyclopedia.

Journalism is also not a product or a platform.

Anyone can write texts, post photos and videos, run websites, newslettersAnd Podcasts or applications. But, for this to be journalism, specific practices must be followed and the goals must, in general, be those of informing the public, scrutinizing the authorities that help to understand the world. It’s not worth going into the topic – for those interested, my colleague Barbara Reese, V.I the news Here on the side writes about the topic.

What matters for this the news Is the generative method of artificial intelligence technology (famous Chatbots) may affect the press; Thus, they influence public space, which means the choices we make, from consumption to voting.

The idea that journalism is not a process of sifting into a repository of facts, and combining the results obtained to create a product, is a useful one for this discussion.

Last week, Google made a a trip by American newspapers for introducing AI tools that are believed to be useful in newsrooms. The company is promoting Bard, its conversational AI platform, which competes with ChatGPT. On the other hand, the middle (Because of the impact that information technologies have had in the last quarter-century, particularly in terms of business) Alert, between the fear of missing out on the next big innovation and the fear of getting burned again.

It is not clear what tools Google has provided to the newspapers. But from what I found Article from The New York Times, is a kind of digital assistant that journalists can use; They are not tools for automatically writing and publishing articles. “Quite simply, these tools are not intended, and cannot, replace the primary role journalists play in reporting, preparing and verifying their articles,” a Google spokeswoman said.

It is a factual and politically correct statement. But there is one passage in the article that caught my attention and gave me a sense of it deja vu: “Some executives who saw Google’s presentation described it as annoying (…) two people said it looked [a empresa] The effort that goes into producing rigorous, well-made articles is taken for granted.”

It is a frequent misconception.

Over the years I’ve written about tech companies and startup companiesThe question I heard many times from people in the sector was, “Where do you get the information from?”

The answer did not fit into the few minutes of casual conversation as I prepared my cell phone to record the interview. It is impossible to explain the role of news agencies, corporate communication, conversations, personally configured sources, field reports, documents obtained at cost, and sometimes in court. It is also difficult to explain that in many cases, obtaining information is the most difficult and time-consuming part. – The concept of information scarcity is not immediate for those who live in an overabundance of information and data.

The people who asked the question are people outside the bubble who know how newsrooms work. Some of them were entrepreneurs after college who spoke to a journalist for the first time. The impression I got from those short conversations was that my interlocutors thought the information in the journalistic work was (in most cases, at least) ready to be found in a document or database.

Also at that time, a bunch of startup companies They had conversations with me about any idea they had of journalism. The ideas weren’t good and I don’t think any of them are startup companies It succeeded, except perhaps for one, which ended up taking what it had developed and shifting to other sectors.

Those questions about the source of information and ideas are well-intentioned startup companies They had one thing in common: the concept of journalism as a product resulting from the compilation of available facts obtained without much effort. The process of turning facts into a final product (which seemed to form the core of these people’s journalistic work) could be improved upon, or partially automated, using any technology. It was a mixture of ignorance and technical solutions.

Artificial intelligence, particularly one that produces texts that are indistinguishable from those produced by humans, will make its way into newsrooms. Publishing text written by machines is nothing new: some news agencies and newspapers, for example, have been doing it for years on topics such as financial markets and corporate results, albeit in a primitive way.

It is difficult to predict how far these technologies will penetrate middle. It is possible that the recent enthusiasm will wane. But the converse is not a hypothesis to be discarded, if the results of the first trials are promising, particularly on the thorny issue of helping journalism make money.

In any case, anyone who develops AI technologies and proposes to apply them to newsroom jobs has minimal obligation to know what journalism is and how it works. Otherwise, we will all waste time and waste efforts.

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