The International News Media Association has released a new report arguing that generative AI offers more opportunities than threats. The report also suggests that newsrooms can quickly benefit from a number of immediate opportunities especially in terms of productivity.
In one of the most exhaustive investigations ever into Generative AI, the INMA has released a 91-page report covering every facet of the technology. Written by INMA’s Smart Data Initiative Lead Ariane Bernard, “News Media At the Dawn of Generative AI” provides an upbeat assessment of its uses in publishing, suggesting that the opportunities outweigh the threats.
Generative AI offers media companies opportunities to find efficiencies, improve productivity, shift resources to high-value journalism, and create new user value propositions.
INMA, “News Media At the Dawn of Generative AI” Report
Citing a poll by the Associated Press, the INMA says that transcription and social media content creation were the top two areas where publishers hoped AI could benefit their productivity. Automated content
generation based on structured data was similarly high on publishers’ wish lists.
The report comes at a time of intense focus on AI’s impact, with the News/Media Alliance releasing a set of AI Principles last Thursday offering comprehensive guidance on the use of generative AI – the first industry trade body to do so.
Productivity tools
The INMA report lists a number of paid-for and free-to-use AI tools that publishers can immediately use to benefit their productivity:
* Otter.ai: Users can participate in video meetings as attendees, record the session, and receive a transcript. Additionally, the technology can create summary points from the meeting, and users can interact with the audio/transcript by highlighting text on the screen and replaying specific sections.
* Good Tape: Denmark’s Zetland has built a transcription service that allows other news journalists to register for the tool for free.
* Jojo: Schibsted-owned VG in Norway has also released a free audio/video transcription tool which
supports 100 languages of inputs.
* ChatGPT: Aside from its obvious uses, the tool can propose keywords for an interview transcript to strengthen future searches; Die Presse in Austria shared with INMA how it may ask ChatGPT for story ideas on a given topic, as well as suggest interview questions.
Separate from the INMA report, Digital Consultant and Investor, Andy Evans, has produced probably the world’s most in-depth list of AI tools for publishers and media organizations.
Reaching new user segments, underserved communities, and cross borders
The INMA lists a number of uses for AI where publishers can reach new user segments and audiences. Aftenposten in Norway, for example, trained an AI on the voice of its podcasters, so each article became available over voice.
A cloned voice belonging to podcast presenter Anne Lindholm can now read entire articles to you, making it as easy to listen to Aftenposten’s articles as it is to read them. When all journalism is now available as audio, we believe even more people will benefit from subscribing to Aftenposten.
Aftenposten
The Dutch public broadcasting service NPO used generative AI to provide synthetic images and visuals to podcasts. The goal? To extend the usefulness of podcasts to people with hearing difficulties, as well as augmenting them with sign language.
The INMA Report’s author also notes that although, “Not one existing publisher can meet more than 20% of all of the world’s people by staying in one language”, soon AI will allow publishers to offer content in multiple languages seamlessly. The report cites, as an example, Singapore Press Holdings which trained a synthetic newscaster to deliver news in Singlish, the local interpretation of English.
Comment sections
Developments in AI might also herald a revolution in publisher comment sections, with the INMA Report highlighting plug ins like Perspective from Google (a free-to-use API), which can identify comments likely to be of low quality or inflammatory. The INMA Report adds that new generative AI will take this one step further and “open up options that we didn’t have before” such as proposing alternatives rather than banning comments.
Finally
[Unrelated to the INMA report] The Washington Post late last week released a new search tool that can find out whether a publisher’s website was used to help train AI systems as part of Google’s C4 dataset. The search tool can be found in the Post’s article Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart.
To download the full INMA Report “News Media at the Dawn of Generative AI” click here