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For this episode of Double Take, CMT Research Fellow Dr Michael Davis speaks to Professor Charlie Beckett, the founding director of Polis at the London School of Economics, a thinktank for research and debate around international journalism and society.
Charlie is leading the JournalismAI project, a global initiative encouraging the responsible adoption of AI in news organisations, and capacity building in all newsrooms to counter inequalities. With the support of the Google News Initiative, JournalismAI has just released a global survey of what news organisations are doing with AI. Charlie was also Lead Commissioner for the LSE Truth, Trust & Technology Commission, which set out to identify the causes of media misinformation and develop a new policy framework.
Before he joined the LSE, Charlie was a programme editor at ITN's Channel 4 News and a senior producer and programme editor at BBC News and Current Affairs.
He’s also the author of SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World and WikiLeaks: News In The Networked Era, and he’s published research on the role of emotions in journalism and AI.
In this episode, we’re talking about the risks and opportunities generative AI brings to news organisations around the world. And there are upsides – like using AI solutions to bridge inequalities between newsrooms through translation tools; optimising connections with audiences by using generative AI to reformat content; and developing gains in efficiency and creativity to enhance the effectiveness of journalism.
There are downsides too...and one is the kind of moral panic generative AI has stirred up and the solution, as Charlie Beckett points out, is for journalists to understand the risks of these new technologies, to better understand their limits.