Broussard (2019) – Artificial intelligence and journalism

Question 1

Communicative AI

Answer 1

Refers to AI technologies such as conversational agents, social
robots, and automated-writing software, that are designed to function as communicators, rather than merely mediators of human communication, often in ways that confound
traditional conceptions of communication theory and practice

Question 2

What does Nicholas Diakopoulos say?

Answer 2

“AI is a new medium through which journalists can express and
exercise their ethical and normative values through the code they implement”. And, because journalism is a deeply human endeavor with many tasks that can be augmented by machines but few that can be entirely replaced by them, he argues that “The future of AI in journalism has a lot of people around”.

• From destroying jobs in journalism, AI appears to be creating them. And thus, we need to develop a research agenda for studying the hybridization of humans and AI in
  journalist workflow

Question 3

What is AI according to Broussard (2019)?

Answer 3

A subfield of the academic discipline of computer science
- There are some subfields in AI: machine learning, expert systems, and natural language processing

Question 4

Journalistic values

Answer 4

• AI is a new medium through which journalists can express and exercise their ethical and normative values through the code they implement
• While AI will help to enhance the speed and scale of news in routine situations, complement and augment journalists, and even create new opportunities for optimization and personalization that would not otherwise be possible, It still can’t do most news work,
  and create new tasks and forms of work
• Scholarship and practice should seek to undertake an agenda for studying human centered AI in journalism
• By understanding the roles and tasks of journalists in hybrid workflows mire thoroughly, studying the ways in which journalists and AI can effectively interact, and collaborate, and elaborating the human perspectives and concerns of autonomy,
  agency, and the ergonomics of labor that these new technologies may upset

Question 5

Human-centered artificial intelligence

Answer 5

• Human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) has been celebrated for shifting the focus away
  from what AI can do to what AI should do.

Question 6

media research

Answer 6

he AI programs and devices that are the subject of media research, such as automated newswriting programs and chatbots, function as more than a channel; they are
designed to fit into the role of communicator, a role that has been predominantly reserved
for humans.
- The result is that scholars now must find ways to theorize journalism, media, and
communication in both human– human and human–machine contexts

Question 7

Limitations of AI

Answer 7

Racial bias of risk assessment tools in criminal justice, gender discrimination in automated hiring, and automated determination of eligibility for social assistance that tends to punish the poor

• Human-centered AI also presents an opportunity for journalists (or other AI practitioners) to embed their own values
• Privacy loss is frequently cited as an undesirable consequence of insufficiently human centered design

Question 8

Missed opportunities by AI

Answer 8

• Without ensuring representation and inclusion of all communities within AI and creating opportunities to look beyond disciplinary boundaries, we will continue to miss opportunities to work toward holistic and innovative solutions that improve the lives of a broad spectrum of our society
• his data inequality limits our understanding of the varied and complex health needs of
  these communities, and algorithmically informed interventions will necessarily fall short of
  addressing them