Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly infiltrating all aspects of life, unveiling new possibilities. In mass media, AI is increasingly becoming prevalent. To understand how artificial intelligence is beneficial to modern media, it is important to learn as much as possible about how it works and the prospects for its further use in journalism.
Is Artificial Intelligence Used in Media?
The use of AI in media is swiftly ascending. To this date, robots have demonstrated the ability to generate high-quality content virtually indistinguishable from that created by humans.
The application of AI in media offers almost unlimited possibilities:
- It allows the automation of writing and editing articles. Machine learning, which is based on finding patterns in data, endows robots with the ability to deeply analyze information. AI tracks trends and creates relevant texts ready for publication. Thus, various events can be reported very quickly: the time gap between an incident and the release of a news article about it is minimized.
- Deploying AI in media significantly increases the efficiency of targeted advertising, thereby increasing advertising revenue in the media.
- Artificial intelligence becomes a reliable assistant editor. This pertains not only to correcting grammatical and typographical errors. Robots significantly elevate the quality of content by identifying various deficiencies, such as discrepancies between the facts mentioned in the article and reality.
- AI can analyze large volumes of data in a very short time, simplifying journalists’ tasks of searching for, researching, and systematizing information on a topic. This is particularly important when compiling news digests.
- Software is capable of automatically processing videos and photos, creating frame-by-frame descriptions, subtitles, etc.
The introduction of artificial intelligence technology in media has opened new, astounding possibilities for further development.
Examples of Use
Each year, robots are increasingly employed in journalism, holding up as strong competitors to news agency staff. Their main purpose in this sphere is the creation of quality content. Given an informational prompt, a pre-trained neural network can independently identify suitable topics and write relevant articles. Some agencies are already successfully using this capability to free journalists from routine tasks, such as compiling stock market summaries.
Robots can assess how certain groups of readers perceive publications, which allows for generating content that meets the demands of the target audience. The system automatically adapts articles for various resources. This is particularly useful when material on the same topic needs to be placed on completely different resources. Adapting texts would take humans a lot of time, whereas computers can handle such tasks in minutes.
The Associated Press, for instance, now uses software to analyze large data sets, thereby resolving an issue that has plagued reporters for many years.
Each quarter, all public companies in America publish their corporate earnings. Associated Press journalists were burdened with the tedious responsibility of studying these reports and composing articles based on the financial indicators stated. Such work was extremely laborious and monotonous. The staff could only produce a few hundred such notes per quarter, leaving all other reports unexamined.
The implementation of AI into this process resulted in remarkable outcomes. The robot creates more than four thousand similar publications per quarter. Importantly, all materials are high-quality and absolutely reliable, not inferior to articles written by humans.
The internationally renowned publication Financial Times also utilizes the possibilities of artificial intelligence in its operations. The company has deployed an algorithm that analyzes user interests. The program records the amount of notes on a particular topic read by each user and, based on this data, suggests content that would interest the reader.
Why AI in Media Will Soon Be the Only Choice
In media circles, debates are still underway as to whether AI can replace a journalist. The majority of experts agree that the future of mass media belongs to artificial intelligence.
This viewpoint is based on the following factors:
- According to public opinion research, articles written by machines engender more trust in readers than content created by humans.
- Using AI, agencies can significantly reduce the number of journalists employed, thereby saving colossal funds.
- The use of robots allows for reaching a larger audience by generating content for different resources: websites, social networks, mobile applications.
- Content creation becomes faster. Media can respond to informational prompts almost instantaneously.
- Artificial intelligence allows for generating personalized content based on user preferences.
For now, articles generated by AI are still published under human supervision. But with rapidly advancing technologies, it won’t be long before all media will operate solely through the use of artificial intelligence.
