How Journalism Will Survive ChatGPT (Gen AI)
Journalists and news analysts look set to enjoy their remaining days in the sun, before it sets. Microsoft‘s recently reported list of jobs under threat by Gen AI leaves few unaffected. Meanwhile the reports around ChatGPT appear impressive.
Underlying those at risk is anyone tied down to a desk job and that largely involves writing. For journalists this could spell trouble, but not quite.
While Writers, authors, broadcast announcers, Radio DJs, News Analyst, Reporters, and Journalists score poorly, professions from the following are the least likely to be replaced by AI: Roofers, Fire fighters, Ship engineers and dishwashers.
And it’s in this list where a small glimmer of hope resides for journalists and media experts.
Context
One of the laments of journalist in the digital age was the proliferation of the ‘air conditioned’ journalists — a label that denotes journalism that operates largely in buildings behind desk tops and involves the gathering of information remotely.
One of journalism’s triumphant calls which became its hallmark in the 1960s was “eye witness” reporting; being on the spot in the news ecology to gather information first hand.
Combing through Microsoft’s report it’s not journalism per se that’s in peril, that is first hand news gathering in the field and reporting, but office-based journalism.
That still leaves little comfort for the rump of the profession, as relatively few organisations, such as the BBC and APTV have the capability of undertaking news gathering to report stories and turn a profit.
But they don’t get off scot free. Newsgathering outfits will now come under huge pressure to break a story first, as once a story surfaces the likelihood is a Gen AI will be able to swiftly replicate the essence of that news, if not the original pictures and soundbites.
How will this impact journalists? The answer could lie in Gary Kasparov’s centaur model otherwise known as advanced Chess, in which Chess players work collaborate with AI. Kasparov, a Grandmaster was beaten by an AI in 1997, only to return a year later with a new Chess game with players aided by AIs. It’s proved popular.
That requires journalists, particularly new ones entering the profession pick up drastically new skills in info retail.
Podcasters Paradise
For anyone with a podcast, or studying journalism, you ought to be considering your own RAG. Imagine you take all your original interviews and feed them into database linked to a LLM e.g. ChatGPT/ Gemini etc.
In other words you’ve augmented/ enhanced the knowledge base of an ChatGPT (LLM) with your own data which facilitates any query to retrieve targeted information and generate a response.
I teach international news reporting at Cardiff University as a former correspondent, and have gathered a number of interviews with leading correspondents that generate bespoke knowledge on becoming a correspondent.
End of Web Design
One area that appears to under threat now is coding. For almost 20 years I trained journalists to build platforms and websites using HTML, CSS and javascript.
A couple of weeks ago I had Gemini build me a site in under twenty seconds. Through iterations I could ask it to perform changes to my liking. The final phase of upload still required some web knowledge, but that’s a pinch point that will erode by getting your AI agent to speak to your web host through its API.
