Like many writers, I’m a sucker for distractions. Anything that prevents me from crashing out those important few hundred words of considered composition is ok by me.
Reflecting on the Reuters Institute’s ‘AI and the Future of News’ conference, I was irresistibly drawn to the twin distractions of the conflict in Iran and the equally mind-blowing voyage of Artemis II to the far side of the moon.
Both events will likely have a far-reaching impact on the world and all who sail in her. And both were a coming of age for the artificial intelligence generation. Every inch of the missions over the barren lands of Iran and the emptiness of space were predicted and recorded with the fast, secure and accurate assistance of AI.
But where does all that leave journalism and the newsrooms of today, let alone the future? Reuters had assembled a multi-talented array of people actually doing it rather than just talking about it.
As director of the Reuters Institute, Mitali Mukherjee, told the 3,000 strong online assembly in her introduction, the conference would look at: “Where you fit into that big smorgasbord of AI and how it’s changing everything that we do.”
Niamh McIntyre, senior reporter covering tech at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, gate-crashed the party with some hard-hitting comments for her fellow writers. “Sometimes AI gets written about in this almost magical way, as if it’s inexplicable. Our job as journalists is to strip away the mystification and ask all the mundane questions we’d ask of any other powerful system,” she said.
“I think it can be quite intimidating for journalist who aren’t tech reporters to try and get started reporting in this area. A lot of that mystification serves the interest of the companies producing that technology, so I think it’s basically about approaching AI as if it were any other kind of system that was built by humans.”
Fellow panel member Joanna Kao, senior editor, Information and Artificial Intelligence, from the Pulitzer Centre agreed: “A lot of what we see are actually big tech narratives, stories that make AI seem really scary, really complicated, using a lot of big words. This intimidates people from asking more questions about how the technology actually works.”
Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter at Bloomberg, was keen to compare climate reporting to what is happening now with AI. “Looking at what's happened with climate is a real warning for how we should be thinking about AI. Yes, it might have benefits, but at what cost?”
“It was these tech companies that were at the forefront of the sustainability story, trying to say, ‘We will be net zero by 2030, we will have all our data centres powered by renewable energy.’”
These same companies, he added, have now stepped back from their climate commitments, in some cases reversing them, and have pivoted to AI.
“One of the things that has been the most powerful for our newsroom evolution on climate has been this idea where the climate desk doesn’t just sit and do its own stories, but actually works with desks across the newsroom,” said Rathi.
Digging deep
Most interestingly for us time-served labourers at the coal face of journalism were some observations that have not changed much since Charles Dickens was a lad. McIntyre pointed to the lack of public information about AI stories, and said her investigations rely on laborious source development.
“What I’ve found quite useful in my own work is actually going to the lowest-paid workers in a tech company, like the data workers, the labellers, the moderators, etc.” she said, adding that these workers are often forgotten and may be more likely to speak to reporters than better-paid colleagues.
Kao promoted the not new idea of just following up with what people say. “We have a lot of stories about announcements where people claim things will happen, but we don’t often then follow up and see whether those claims actually came to be.”
Another journalistic trope to be given an airing was the age-old issue of verification. Elfredah Kevin-Alerechi, from the African focused Colonist Report explained how AI has allowed smaller news outlets like hers to expand their work despite their limited resources.
She said that AI has allowed her team to enhance their investigative work, particularly in areas such as data analysis and content generation. But she cautioned against relying too much on AI without verification. “The biggest opportunity is that it will enhance our work as investigative journalists, but then we should not give it 100% trust,” she said.
Ryan McNeill, who works on geospatial investigations for Reuters, had a more technical example: “You have to be able to justify every single coding decision that you make,” he said. “So if you’re running around and you’re coding and you don’t know what it’s doing, you won’t be able to catch errors.”
“One of the things that AI is great at is transforming something that is already well structured, like an article, into something else,” he said. “So it’s not hard to identify quite clearly articulated frameworks like the easy-read framework, and transform journalism into that. Simplifying the journalism through that lens can also give you a little more confidence that it’s not going to mangle the journalism in quite the same way.”
They said it…
Soundbites from some of the conference speakers:
- “We are in danger of getting to a place where no one believes anything they’d read or see or hear anywhere.” Chris Morris, CEO of the British fact-checker Full Fact
- “UK journalists tend to be pessimistic about the effect of AI on journalism: 62% see it as a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ threat to journalism, and only 15% see it as a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ opportunity.” Dr Richard Fletcher from the Reuters Institute tells it how it is in the research paper ‘AI adoption by UK journalists and their newsrooms’.
- “I don’t think we can construct narratives that are as emotionally engaging as disinformation. I do think we need to work more through trusted proxies: community figures and influencers who already have established connections with these audiences.” Jiménez Cruz, from Spanish fact-checker Maldita
- “We innovate over the heads of people. That potentially could lead to an AI legitimacy bubble of regulations that pretend to promote the public interest. But if this bubble pops, what I fear we might see is democratic disruption and the loss of trust and legitimacy of the institutions that pertain to regulate AI for the greater good.” Natali Helberger, professor in law and digital technology at the University of Amsterdam
- “There were massive investments of hundreds of billions of dollars to build these systems and data centres and investors want their money back from somewhere, and it seems it’s going to come from ads, warfare and political control and surveillance.” Max Kasy, professor of economics at the University of Oxford
- “Many journalists and media professionals might want the public to look more kindly on the sector as a whole, but ultimately they might settle for people at least valuing those who really do deliver stand-out journalism, also with the help of generative AI.” Dr Felix Simon, presenting ‘Generative AI and news report 2025’
Come on you SPUR…
In a rare display of unity, similar to cross-border alliances formed to take on a common enemy, leaders of some of the UK’s big name newsbrands have come together to form SPUR - the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition.
The BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News and the Telegraph are all signatories to an open letter exhorting global leaders across publishing, broadcasting, media and news to join them to develop shared industry standards, ‘creating responsible pathways for original journalism to be used sustainably’.
That rallying call letter says: “Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how content is created, distributed, discovered and monetised. We believe we need to come together to protect original journalism and secure the long-term sustainability of our industry.
“AI brings opportunities for publishers and our audience. Our organisations are already at the forefront of using AI in responsible ways to benefit our audiences. But AI also raises urgent questions about fairness, consent, attribution, transparency and trust.”
They are concerned about how reporting, archives and original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems. “This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism. The lack of transparency about how AI answers are created risks eroding public trust in both the news and the technologies used to access it.”
The mission, SPUR says, is clear, aiming to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways, while guaranteeing that publishers retain practical control of their content and receive fair value when it is used.
Quite how all that will be achieved is less clear in a crowded marketplace for rights distribution, syndication, rights and licensing. But with a goal “to help shape a market that rewards original reporting and supports responsible AI innovation”, who can argue with that?
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
