Dr Kailash Mishra strides the international intellectual world like a colossus. The Odisha-born scholar is a numero-uno figure in very many spheres of national and international academia and a globetrotting visiting professor to universities in the USA, England, Middle East, Japan and the like. He is an educationist in areas like Management, Physics, Financial Economics. He has created and nurtured a few universities, institutes and academies. He has authored two dozen books and a number of industry-specific monograms. His contribution to Econophysics and management concepts were futuristic when formulated but now well imbibed in the disciplines. Like Mark Twain, he self-effaces, “My top of the league education has never stood in my way to understand and enhance less-privileged students.’ In an interview to The Pioneer, Dr Mishra spoke to Sugyan Choudhury explaining the challenges at the advent of Artificial Intelligence to media industry.
What is happening in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) world?
A girl, Dolly Tu, recently applied for admission in the famed Carnegie Mellon University for 2023 spring semester. She got acceptance letter last week in December 2023 in the subject of creative arts for journalism. Humans discovered Dolly to be the first AI student in the world.
As we create AI with our human genius, we slowly become them, as they slowly become us. AI dates back to 1955 when Stanford University’s Professor John McCarthy used the term to describe the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Slowly, society encountered datafication; and information and communications technology (ICT) is engulfing human life in all possible areas. AI is seeing a resonant peak usage emerging out of the closets of Hollywood movies. AI mimics human abilities and has developed capability for instant reasoning and analytic behaviour. It has both virtue and vice of self-propagation and escalation. It detects novel situations by predictive analysis and offers tactically-optimised solutions. AI is the process of creating computing machines and systems that perform operations analogous to human learning and decision-making.
Has AI already made inroads into journalism?
Before the dying days of last millennium, I asked students of SPAIN, Mumbai to identify the reason for “format competition” in print media. Then, Western media was abandoning broad sheet newspapers and creating tabloids. The students found convenience of travel reading as the main reason for tabloid format. News media has been greatly disrupted by the technology-driven approaches in the cybernetics loop. Cybernetics loop consists of input, throughput, output and recycling or feedback. In the context of news industry, it is creation, production, distribution and internalising experience of news products and services. AI has become a very real challenge for the news industry. Researchers have identified adoption steps of AI in news industry. The seven subfields of AI for this are machine learning; computer vision (CV); speech recognition; natural language processing (NLP); planning, scheduling and optimisation; expert systems; and robotics. Of these, three subfields are aggressively entering into the news media: machine learning, computer vision and planning, scheduling and optimisation. The slogans for journalists seem to be “adopt artificial intelligence or junk your essence”, or latch to AI or perch to die”.
How is top in class journalism responding to AI movement?
Journalism had recorded peak activity about a decade back, after which innovation or reinvention of news production and consumption became less and less alluring. Unapologetic rhetoric exhausted the profession universally. AI brought back innovation in journalism. ChatGPT arrived in November of 2022 jolting the world in general and information world in particular. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can generate human-like text using a deep neural network. It is powered by a transformer network and trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback. AI-driven innovation is now the urgent focus of the sensible in every newsroom having strategic thinking to survive and grow. In March 2023, a newsroom in San Diego announced ‘I am The FittAIst’, the world’s first AI-generated satirical newsroom. As an advanced AI, FittAIst has already surpassed humans in the realm of comedy. The FittAIst takes pride in its "Human-Free Pledge," ensuring that no articles or headlines on the site are written by human hands. This AI newsroom guarantees that its content remains pure and uninhibited by the shortcomings of human intellect, agenda blind loyalty and bias.
What are the bottlenecks of AI adoption in journalism?
Talent competition is the most prominent bottleneck for the development of AI in news. IT industry offers better compensations than news industry. Experts in AI in newsrooms will precipitate a brain drain to IT industry. News projects are already comfortable with machine learning. In India, many are using journalistic bots but do not quite use machine learning or NLP models. Unfortunately, USA President election of 2016 brought gross abuse of AI platform to influence not only public opinion but election itself. The world is looking at Russia in askance. Fake news industry has flourished not only in India but the world at large.
AI models are generally built for a particular story. New projects need new algorithms and newer training. AI investments cannot be amortised over multiple products. Investigative news projects rely on computer vision for quick and reliable results. This requires significant investments to build technological infrastructure and hire highly-qualified personnel to develop such codes. Furthermore, AI models have to start from a priori human generated datasets which have liability of being biased datasets with many ethical complications.
Despite all these bottlenecks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press and many other newsrooms have adopted AI seamlessly. Release of ChatGPT has somewhat solved high-investment compulsions. Different tasks such as article generation, translation, summarisation and prediction and uses less computing power. But risks such as the creation of distorted content, which can be used to deceive the public, fake news, accumulating disjointed news parts to look authentic to damage counter parties and distort public opinion are getting accentuated with every AI power enhancement.
What the future holds in AI-driven world of media?
AI will disrupt media industry and journalistic profession. Computer Vision algorithms as a component of AI can be divided into two strands: image recognition for automation of journalism and machine vision to perceive an environment AI systems must adhere to legal and ethical guidelines without explicitly considering the power structures between various stakeholders. Deep fakes will surface and public awareness must be upgraded.
