[FRIAM] journalists

[Tom Johnson]

Pieter:
Sorry for the delay in responding.

The use of AI-type technologies has been around for 15-20 years as applied
to constant, data-related topics, e.g. stock market stories ("The share
price of X corporation rose Y on heavy trading today.") and sports stories
-- football (yours and ours), baseball, horse racing, etc.  In a similar
manner, obituaries can also be written if someone plugs in the vital
components: So-and-so died X.  He was born Y in X and attended Z high
school.

I think though, it's going to be a while before AI can do everything.  For
example, all phenomena/stories have Qualitative, Quantitative and
Geographic aspects wrapped up in a Timeline to understand and reflect
change(s).  The journalist, ideally, has to determine where to get the best
data -- and in what format(s) -- to understand the phenomena, then what
tools are best for analyzing it and, finally, how will the findings be best
presented (this could be presented in multiple formats, but each will have
different requirements).

Or to take a current live example, if reporters are on the streets covering
a demonstration, can AI be trained to "see" the best photo opportunity from
infinite angles?  I don't think so, at least not yet.

Tom

============================================
Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
*NM Foundation for Open Government* <http://nmfog.org>
*Check out It's The People's Data
<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-The-Peoples-Data/1599854626919671>*

============================================


On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 12:34 AM Pieter Steenekamp <
pieters at randcontrols.co.za> wrote:

> I'm not a journalist, but offer my opinion in any case:
>
> a) Accoriding to Forbes
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2020/05/30/dozens-of-msn-journalists-to-be-replaced-by-robots/#14c9ff97333e ,
> Microsoft does not produce their own stories, but uses editors to select
> and adapt stories from other sources. They are replacing staff with AI, but
> because they don't have journalists, they're not replacing journalists with
> AI.
>
> b) I know it's opinion only, but IMO in a reasonably short time most
> services and products will be provided with a fraction of all humans, AI
> and automation will do the balance of the work.AI selecting news stories is
> one example, Another example is, although Elon is probably not going to
> meet his schedule with full self-driving cars, the probability is
> reasonably high that he will achieve it in say 5 years. This is going to
> cause massive unemployment - drivers are not going to learn to code, and
> coders are being replaced by AI in any case too. If you're not a top
> programmer, your employment prospects are not secure. Our challenge is to
> adapt. I'm not American, but if America should elect Andrew Yang (maybe
> 2024?) as president then America could lead the world in adapting for a
> world where there are not conventional employment opportunities for all.
>
>
> On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 20:34, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
> wrote:
>
>> I see that MSN is replacing human journalists with AIs. Curious as to the
>> reaction from real journalists among FRIAM?
>>
>> davew
>>
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