Exploring the Applications and Ethical Dilemmas of Generative Artificial Intelligence in News Production

Abstract

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in news production changes media landscape and future of journalism. The paper investigates these technologies through both their considerable applications and the important moral issues in today's time. We describe GenAI's powerful promise to improve newsroom efficiency by creating news content through automatic tools and other means including financial earnings reports or sporting event recap; analyzing data and providing visualizations to find hidden insights, generate narratives, build better visuals from images or videos, automatically translate to other language, design new storytelling; offering personalized daily summarized news as well as even helping to do researches and write first drafts-and how doing all that can come at great moral price to journalism, a most urgent crisis of mistrust to public life, etc. In contrast we are critically reflecting many difficult challenges it entails including the use of AI's advanced natural language processing to spread fake information and deepfakes; incorporating algorithmic bias that might generate harmful/uneven/misleading/narrow viewpoints or content; confusions related to machine-generated content, the editorial process being hidden through layers, and accountability behind machines becomes complex, creating new questions like trustworthiness, truthfulness, plagiarism, authorship, attribution, IP rights, and bias; generating huge quantity of terrible news and articles that would take humans too long to assess or correct; destroying journalistic jobs, and basic skills in favor of automations; creating a host of more problematic concerns in terms of journalistic quality, verified accuracy and reliability; undermining integrity, credibility and other principles embedded throughout journalistic practices-without mentioning others. In our view journalism needs to use those revolutionary tools responsibly but remain cautiously about current state-of-the-art AI-related systems given they have their dangerous tools as well as their own safeguarding instruments including constant scrutiny, oversight, critical awareness, vigilance. Therefore the future is to rethink how we relate ourselves to AI to form constructive human-AI relations and collaborations without losing or weakening our basic journalistic roles as truth-seekers, watchdogs, as well as providing good service to humanity or for public good in particular.

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