Public engagement is basic for journalism to deal with the artificial intelligence
(Translated from a Portuguese text using Google Translator and Grammarly)
Journalism needs people to survive. This Acacian statement has gained new meaning in the digital age, especially now with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI). Until now, the ordinary citizen was seen as basically a consumer of the news commodity developed and disseminated by journalists and the press. The public’s choices also served as a statistical parameter to measure the degree of acceptance, popularity and relevance of the news.
But today, producing news is no longer exclusive to both professionals and journalistic companies thanks to the avalanche of information on the internet and social networks. Algorithms, using artificial intelligence resources, tend to replace journalists in the search and recombination of basic elements that make up news. But it will be up to professionals to have the irreplaceable role of educating and guiding people about which news generated with the help of AI can be considered reliable and relevant to members of social communities.
The hype that is being created around artificial intelligence stems from the fact that it will actually replace mechanical activities when it comes to putting together a news story. Every reporter knows that a report ideally consists of fieldwork (observation of reality), consulting sources (witnesses and experts), and assembling and recombining these pieces into text, audio or images consumed by readers, listeners or viewers. In the analogue era, this process still depended heavily on the skills of the reporter or editor, especially when it came to recombining and remixing the facts, events and values incorporated into textual, sound or visual news.
Now, in the era of algorithms, everything that depended on mechanical actions, therefore repetitive, is being replaced by algorithms that seek and recombine zillions of data, facts and events on the internet at a speed, diversity and amplitude impossible to be matched by any human being, including geniuses. Putting together a piece of news has become something almost instantaneous, which will empty the newsrooms of these 24-hour news programs like Globo News and CNN. The speed and low cost of news algorithmic production will lead to the emergence of new businesses and consequently increase competition.
This is where people become important again for journalism, because only those projects that manage to establish interactivity with their target audience, capable of allowing the establishment of criteria of relevance and reliability in the selection of news, in the midst of the overwhelming oversupply of news, will manage to survive. These criteria cannot be established only by professionals because the journalist is just a part of the reality experienced by the target audience. He needs the other parties to be able to develop indicators of credibility and relevance appropriate to the group of people.
Disturbing effects
In the analogue era, the relationship between journalism and all citizens was impacted by the commercialization of news and the elitization of the press. In addition to the distancing caused by the need to “sell” the news, the press became culturally, politically and financially linked to the elites in power, a process in which the press ended up becoming a kind of parlour for leaders of the regional, national and international establishment. Obviously, this ended up being reflected in journalistic guidelines that were influenced by a game of power among elites, with little or no interest on the part of the general public.
Breaking this paradigm in the digital age has become a survival strategy both for journalism, whether made up of salaried or non-salaried professionals and for the journalistic companies that form the institution called the press. News is rapidly changing from being a marketable product to something that people need to develop knowledge that allows them to seek the best solutions for their financial, medical, educational, family and professional problems to mention only the most important ones. All of this in a disturbing and complex news environment where public information flows suffer the disorienting effects of the combination of information avalanche and artificial intelligence.
