I’m preparing to fly home to Berlin from Lisbon, where I’ve spent the last few days at this year’s unusually controversial Web Summit. A recurring theme throughout the show was that of AI and its impact on trust, and I moderated an extremely worthwhile discussion on the media-literacy side of the subject with Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace and Thomson Reuters Foundation editor-in-chief Yasir Khan.
These are two of the most authoritative organizations in the business, and their size and stature naturally affect how they approach the advent of generative AI and its ability to concoct convincing fakes. For one thing, they have reputations that they’ve spent decades building, which means news consumers are likely to trust their output. They’re also big enough to produce their own photos and videos, and to dedicate staff to verifying outside content.
“We can’t inform our audiences about what’s real and what’s not and what to look out for unless we do that internally as well. So a lot of what we’ve been doing over these last couple of months is really developing internal frameworks, internal standards, [and] sharing them with the rest of the industry,” said Pace. “We as a news organization have to say our role is to be able to provide you trusted, accurate, real information, and…making sure that we don’t do anything that knocks us off that position becomes more essential than ever.”
“We are talking a lot about what we can do to be transparent, to be able to say: ‘This is why this photo that we’ve taken is legitimate, because we can prove that there was a photographer behind it who was in this location. Here’s a little bit about them and here’s the other work that they’ve been doing from this space,’” she added.
“I do worry about the smaller newsrooms, because a) they don’t have the brand recognition, and b) they don’t have the systems in place that help them do due diligence on a photograph, a piece of video, or a piece of text,” said Khan.
The thing is, these days many people aren’t getting their news directly from newsrooms at all, regardless of the size. Instead, they’re getting it from social media. A new Pew study shows a skyrocketing proportion of TikTok users who regularly go there for news—up from 22% to 43% just in the last few years. I chatted at the conference with Chris Chandler, a TikTok newsreader who has racked up over 250,000 followers in that period. Many of his young viewers tell him they want to get their news from someone like him rather than traditional media, he told me. This is the future and I, a digital-first journalist since I entered the newswriting game in the mid-2000s, now know how print journalists felt when people like me came along.
So how are people like Chandler supposed to handle the AI effect, in terms of both questionable content sources and the opportunities that the technology could offer?
“[I’d offer] the same advice I would give to journalists in our newsroom: Make sure you get it right, because a reputation is something that is easier to acquire and difficult to shake,” said Khan. (Chandler repeatedly told me how important he finds it to be unbiased, which is often not the case among his peers.)
Pace noted that tech companies have a big role to play in flagging inauthentic content, but both she and Khan also stressed that everyone has a responsibility to be savvy about what’s real or not. As Khan put it: “Educating the public from a very young age on being better consumers of news just builds better societies, and makes societies that are probably immune to a lot of the disinformation.”
And both expressed faith that this is what young people want. “I…think about the positive of why people have gravitated towards some TikTokers or social media influencers who are focused on doing reporting and real news,” said Pace. “It’s because they see themselves in that coverage. They think the perspective represents what they’re after more than what they’ve seen in traditional media. To me that is…still people seeking accurate information, still people wanting to go out and find what’s happening in the world. But it’s a challenge for us, to say ‘How do we make them see themselves and their perspective in what we’re doing?’”
More (reliable!) news below.
David Meyer
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