Mediawatch AI coming ready or not for our news and music
Business is booming in artificial intelligence technology and new applications appear in the news almost daily. At an AUT symposium this week, experts said it's already being deployed in creative industries to create instant ad campaigns, virtual influencers, robo-journalism and machine-made music. But is AI a creative collaborator - or just a 'handy butler'?
Business is booming in artificial intelligence technology and new applications appear in the news almost daily. At an AUT symposium this week, experts said it's already being deployed in creative industries to create instant ad campaigns, virtual influencers, robo-journalism and machine-made music. But is AI a creative collaborator - or just a 'handy butler'?
"Artificial intelligence has moved forward at such dizzying speed over the last year it's rarely out of the news. And it's mostly bad news," says Nikki Mandow in a new Newsroom podcast series (with the help of a commercial sponsor): AI - Harnessing The Speed Of Change
One industry working out how to harness AI is the media - and the news media is wrestling with how it is already being harnessed by AI.
Generative AI products - such as Chat GPT, Google Bard and Microsoft's BingChat can generate text, images and audio automatically in response to simple requests - and the most powerful of the applications are already crawling all over the news media for its input.
Google has done this for years to inform its online searches. But while Google's algorithm gives searchers dozens of choices from the online information it has indexed, AI-powered search generative experience (SGE) responds to requests with a single summary that's meant to be reliable and factual.
Earlier this year Gordon Crovitz, the founder of the US-based fake-news detection service Newsguard, told Mediawatch the chatbots are not that good at it yet.
"AI models will create highly persuasive well written radio scripts or newspaper articles that are written beautifully with perfect grammar - and completely false. And the machines don't know the difference unless they've been trained. They end up repeating misinformation, The AI can get even worse as the developers think they're making it better," he warned.
Last week The UK-based Guardian confirmed that it has prevented the Chat GPT-maker OpenAI from harvesting its content.
CNN, Reuters, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the New York Times are also reportedly blocking AI aps online
But the same AI tools extracting useful stuff from news media can also be handy for them in gathering and publishing the news and producing it digitally. …