Top experts and scholars at USC gathered Tuesday on an online panel to discuss the impact Generative AI could have on journalism — the good and the bad.
With more journalists and students utilizing GenAI more often, is AI an inevitable contribution to journalism in the new age?
The use of ChatGPT has been popularized among students, scholars and other seekers of knowledge over the past year. ChatGPT represents only one form of GenAI. Other GenAI tools that can help create images, music and other creative expressions.
Students and journalists, including those within Annenberg Media, have already started to consider the role of AI in their work.
Annenberg Media has started experimenting with GenAI by generating summaries for its capsule section.
However, like all sources of information journalists employ, skepticism is necessary.
“I am just extremely leery of presuming that there is necessarily a future for generative AI in some types of work when the premise of what journalism is is that it has to be accurate,” Matt Pearce, a reporter for the LA Times, said during Tuesday’s event.
Journalism publications cannot afford to make an error with misinformation, which is why navigating AI may pose a problem if used incorrectly.
“A lot of us are covering the Israel-Gaza conflict right now, and you have to be able to account for every word that you choose to use in a story because people are watching like a hawk,” Pearce said. “And they expect that you’re going to be using highly accurate and justifiable language in every element of this entirely contentious conflict.”
Although GenAI aids in decreasing research time and eliciting creativity for its users, some experts speculate it could lead to an increase of misinformation within journalism — not only from relying on it for information but also in the way it can alter the reader’s intake of news.
“The question is answered in that first search result. It’s not a link that you’re getting. You’re getting a blurb,” USC journalism professor Gabriel Kahn said during the event. “So imagine people stopping right there and never make it to the actual news site.”
Like the introduction of computers and other technological advancements in the past, AI could become an integral part of the research process.
“What we always drill it down to in the end is that AI is really, hopefully, going to give the student an assist and not do it for them,” Christina Bellantoni, journalism professor and director of the Annenberg Media Center, said during the event.