40 HIGHLANDER FEATURES
An earthquake occurs. Within five minutes, articles have disseminated information on the natural disaster’s whereabouts and its magnitude. Social media buzzes with posts about what happened, and people quickly check in with others after seeing information online. Soon, people across the globe know that articles about the earthquake are published in several different languages. How is this information being spread so quickly? Media companies such as the Los Angeles Times have begun using bots (software robots) to publish automated articles based on data generated by the US Geological Survey, according to Forbes Magazine. The use of these bots and artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly prevalent in journalism, transforming the industry and the way information is distributed to people. AI is used on both a local and global scale in projects such as templated stories (like the earthquake article), homepage curation systems, and recommendation engines. “I think it can be helpful to have artificial intelligence in journalism because it’s concise and quick. And for templated stories, there wouldn’t be an opportunity for someone to mess up the statistics; bots can just keep everything strictly news based,” said Bella Reeves, a freshman at UC Berkeley who is studying film. AI is also used to monitor people’s behavior online. For example, according to Columbia Journalism Review, in 2014, several Twitter bots were launched in an attempt to track the anonymous editing of Wikipedia pages by government officials. One popular example of these bots is the @GCCAedits bot, which tracked anonymous edits to the Parliament of Canada and Senate of Canada Wikipedia pages and identified whether edits came from computer addresses part of these organizations. This bot received a flood of media coverage for its work, and as a
Mira Bhatt
result, became well-known by government officials. The International Journal of Communication later conducted a study about the bot and interviewed a government minister who confirmed he warned other staff members to beware of the bot, revealing that @GCCAedits had an impact on government officials and reduced negative behavior. Though it has helped reduce negative behavior online, people still wonder about the ethical implications of using artificial intelligence in journalism. “I just feel like it’s not realistic. You don’t get that humanistic element in writing by bots, but I think over time [the bots] will be able to replicate it, even though that gets rid of jobs, which can bring up other issues,” said Saya Deshpande, a senior at Carlmont. Carlmont English teacher Tiffany Jay agrees with this idea and believes that students should be careful with the types of content and sites they interact with online. “I’m concerned for the privacy of students because they may not be aware if their information is used for advertising purposes or profiling purposes and how their data is being shared,” Jay said. Through the use of AI, the journalism industry is transforming to become more computational. More journalists are using spreadsheets and databases to observe quantitative patterns and analyze how certain algorithms affect article readability. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Mississippi sifted through roughly 6000 news articles to understand the usage of social media as sources as social media continues to become more prevalent in society. Their study found that social media content in the news had doubled from 2013-2017 and that smaller publications rely on this content more so than mainstream media. “AI and technology have impacted a lot of online content and really allowed people to spread their opinions. I think it will continue to push us forward and especially news organizations,” said Cooper Perez, a senior at Carlmont.
Technology transforms journalism
