Chiang Mai, Thailand - In early 2023, Artificial Intelligence (AI) rose in popularity worldwide due to its potential in generating almost everything. In particular, it has the capacity to produce articles in less than a minute, which has raised concerns about job losses.

With the rapid increase in AI development, journalism has been flagged up as one of the most vulnerable vocations that AI will replace. However, despite the fact that AI threatens journalists, it doesn't appear likely that it will replace the profession in a significant way.

Currently, there are a few popular AI generators, including ChatGPT, Bard, Jasper, AI Writer, Anyword, among others.

Before AI started trending, there were a few newsrooms that already used automation, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Associated Press. In particular, Xinhua News Agency has developed an AI news presenter.

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At the 13th ASEF Journalists Seminar in Singapore in November, Wu Shangyuan, a lecturer and media researcher at the Department of Communications and New Media, spoke about automated journalism, which can reflect on AI nowadays.

Can AI replace human journalists?

Even if AI is capable of producing articles, it is still inferior to humans in all stages of news production, including news gathering, news selection, news writing, and news editing.

In the news-gathering stage, AI is capable of data scraping, trending story alerts, news content aggregation and funneling, as well as gathering video or image content for news articles. However, it cannot ensure the data or information is accurate or relevant to the article. In addition, conducting interviews with individuals is crucial to articles during the news-gathering stage. AI is unable to locate and interview people.

Even if AI is being developed to interview individuals, the response that it receives will be controlled by the source. It cannot persuade individuals to reveal particular information as effectively as a person can as AI lacks slang, humor, anger, and other human emotions.

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In addition, it is unable to critique things as AI was developed to fit into the human digital environment. Therefore, it won't have any grievances and is unable to observe or understand what is happening in society, or what problems or needs people have. As AI is unable to understand local political, legal, and cultural contexts, news reporting is more likely to contain incomplete or inaccurate information.

When it comes to the news selection stage, humans are able to determine the credibility of sources, identify trending stories using web analytics, and determine newsworthiness. AI, on the other hand, cannot detect human emotions or distinguish between correlation and causation. Moreover, it is unable to combine videos, images, and texts together in news products. It still needs human assistance.

During the news writing stage, AI can translate, transcribe, visualize data, and write. In particular, it can produce the story in a few minutes. However, when examined closely, it falls short in terms of organizing unstructured data and writing up stylized news. Beyond that, AI lacks the skills necessary to add value to stories. It cannot get the story behind the data, add color, wit, analysis, and especially emotion to stories. In comparison, people are capable of producing investigative reporting and long-form or in-depth features on a certain topic that benefits audiences.

Last but not least, AI can play an important role in spell-checking during the news editing stage. However, it cannot verify or flag up fake news. Particularly, it is unable to keep track of what is being published, making it impossible to determine whether news is significant and relevant to the general audience. Each newsroom also has its own way of writing stories. If newsrooms rely on AI, which is unable to detect these styles, it will develop a certain style and lose the ability to distinguish itself from competitors.

Besides that, it's more likely that AI won't be able to replace people when carefully considering the ethics and professionalism of journalism. It will only have a negative impact on news consumption as AI may include and disseminate misinformation to audiences. Meanwhile, humans contribute to accuracy and build trust with the public.

AI appears to be practical and effective, and it can certainly perform many tasks just as well as humans. It still has gaps, though, and won't be able to replace the role of a human journalist. Instead of taking the place of humans, it can assist journalists in clearly reporting news on certain topics, from news gathering to news writing, allowing journalists to give audiences informative and in-depth stories. As a result, journalists must fully take advantage of the potential of AI in order to boost their productivity.

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Creativity in Journalism Needed in the Digital Age

Despite the fact that AI is less likely to replace people, journalists face the challenges of an increase in content creators and citizen journalists. To address these difficulties, journalists, and newsrooms in particular, need to be more creative and critical in providing their audiences with in-depth articles. They may do this by introducing immersive, multimedia, and data visualization.

By shifting to immersive stories, it will be possible for news to better fit inside the news cycle. Additionally, it demonstrates an emphasis on more human interest features that appeal to audience preferences and curiosity. As a result, it will help enhance audience engagement with stories, bring to life scenarios in the past that otherwise cannot be relieved, and allow more voices to be heard beyond those of official sources.

Multimedia enables journalists to use creativity to engage the audience. To draw the audience to read an article, journalists sometimes use short videos as the article cover. In addition, they can combine many material types into a single interactive package, including text, audio, photos, animations, and video. Therefore, creativity can also be used to boost audience engagement.

Recently, the importance of data journalism was highlighted by the Asia Pacific Digital Right Assembly 2023. It empathized that data might play a crucial role in converting something abstract into something relevant and intelligible. With the data, audiences can make judgments and grasp complicated issues with ease. Additionally, it enables journalists to strengthen their articles by including fresh information or insights that are hidden in the raw data.

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