Here at CMT we, like many others, have been intrigued with AI since the release of ChatGPT. Amidst all the fuss, it’s easy to forget that AI has been making its way into news reporting for quite a few years now. Mostly this involves generating natural-language reports from facts or figures that are fed in from another source like market or weather data. Yet generative AI is transforming not just news production but presentation as well. As the ABC reported this week, Asian broadcasters have not been shy, with AI-generated weather presenters and news anchors hitting (I’d hesitate to say ‘gracing’) the Indian, Indonesian and Taiwanese airwaves this year. Sky News UK has gone a step further, generating an AI-generated journalist to deliver an AI-generated story. It seems strange you’d go straight for removing the most obviously human part of the news, but I guess AI just isn’t too good at the other part yet.
Thankfully, CMT’s new podcast, Double Take, which kicks off this week, features only real humans. More on that below. Also this week, with debate over regulation of misinformation heating up on both sides of the Pacific, Sacha casts an eye at the complexities of balancing free speech with other rights. Tim narrows his gaze on Twitter, where the balance seems to have been lost, asking why we continue to stick it out. And Derek expands on the strife in Canada, where Meta and Google are poised to pull news from their platforms.
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Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow