Journalism in an AI-enabled future

What could news look like as the world changes?

As you read this I’ll be sitting on the banks of Loch Fyne in the glorious county of Argyll – as our friends who are hosting us have insisted I add. If I’m feeling brave, I might even be in the loch, getting all that cold-water energy to fuel my return to work next week.

In Scotland I’ll have done my best to forget about work for a few days away from the media maelstrom, but I know there are big questions that await on my return.

Mostly, I want to get to terms with what journalism could look like in an AI-enabled future. I say “could” because I think nobody really knows for sure what lies ahead. As I’ve said before, I think it’s certain that AI will change not just how journalists do things, but what they do.

A good guess at the present time is that the news of the future will be multi-modal and highly personalised. People will respond positively to getting the news in the format they want on the platform they want at the time they want. But what does that mean in practice and how do we get there? Those, I think, are the kind of topics we’ll be talking about with clients over the next few months.

Others have gone further in pursuing ideas of what the future looks like. I am indebted to David Caswell, now as many times before, in drawing my attention to the thought-provoking work that Markus Franz of Ippen Media had done in imagining such scenarios.

Franz asked Manus, the autonomous AI agent, to write a think tank-style report about how news consumption by individuals might change in an AI-driven future (he was more specific but you don’t need to read the whole prompt).

The results are slightly mind-blowing. It imagines a world where news becomes continuous, not episodic, but also informed by AI that has instant access to the entirety of human knowledge. We won’t be receiving news updates but having conversations with interfaces that respond to our questions but also have a deep understanding of both of our knowledge and everything that has gone before.

The idea of what news is will change completely. The suggestion is it will become more useful to individuals – but there’s also societal questions that need resolving if we really will be in our own “news bubbles”.

I haven’t done the report justice, so I’ve attached a link here. It’s definitely worth a read.

The encouraging news is that it envisages a future role for humans and journalists. Turns out that even an AI thinks our judgment has a lot of worth.