AI has become a powerful tool for media houses when it comes to news. Empowered by ML based recommender systems, news and media outlets can fast check and cross verify large amounts of data in real time. This is thousand times the speed of a human. AI has empowered media houses with the generation of large amounts of data and accurate digital storytelling. AI enabled data labelling and data annotation are going to make news posts reliable, easily retrievable and deployable for any future use. Completely automated book publishing is already underway and tech smart tools enabled publishing houses are going to play a critical role in future. Pattern recognition, speech to text synthesis and vice versa, content synthesis , sign language production enabled text and image description plus automatic subtitling are slowly but slowly revolutionising visual arts , movie industry and audio visual components for media houses.
However, the same tools which make AI enabled media praiseworthy raise some concerns:
- They can be used to serve misinformation
- They can be used to plagiarise original information and sometimes give inappropriate information
- They can be used to generate deepfakes
- Statistical Language Processing give 50% accuracy and 50% errors which is very high error .
The slow invasion of AI in media has been the cause of cutting down of the human workforce and rendered many jobs as redundant, the US Bureau of Statistics has cited a decline of 60% employees in media over a span of 25 years. In India, we had seen a tendency for permanent media jobs to be replaced by contractual ones. However, following intrinsic qualities of humans cannot be replaced by AI, which make up the part of any story. The qualities are: a) Emotions b) Adaptability c) Branding and Connect d) Ethics e) Grounding Connect f) Ability to take decisions and g) Social and Environmental Consequences. These add the value to content and create articles of Scopus indexed and other meritorious journals and magazines. To conclude AI is there and would remain in Media, but needs to be treated carefully. Do you agree?