AI and Journalism - listen to my article for the British Journalism Review

This article appears is published in the December edition of the British Journalism Review - it explores the implications of artificial intelligence for journalism. In it I reflect on meeting the ‘Godfather of AI’ - Geoff Hinton to record an interview with Jack Stilgoe, for a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme called ‘How Real is the Existential Threat from AI’.

To explore what AI can do, in the article I use an AI powered text to audio platform called Descript to develop AI responses to the question of what AI means for journalism. You can listen to it below.

Or you can read the article in the BJR itself

World Service documentary: US Local News 2024 - on the front page, front line.

TX October 10th 2024. US Local News 2024: On the Front Page Front Line
I produced this documentary with BBC reporter Gary O’Donoghue visiting small town papers in America to hear of the pressures they face during a divisive Presidential election campaign.

Small town papers have lost readers and revenue to digital, their role in local communities has been challenged, and in a divisive Presidential election year, the pressures are even greater.

LISTEN HERE

BBC reporter Gary O’Donoghue visits the Marion County Record, in Kansas, which was raided by police in August last year.

In the documentary the editors of the Marion County Record, Wet Mountain Tribune and the Storm Lake Times talk about their papers and the impact of national political debates at a local level. We also hear from the Knight Foundation and the American Journalism Project about the significance of the decline in local papers and why initiatives to help new digital start-ups are important, including an election hub providing tools to fight disinformation. From Pew Research we hear how Republican and Democrat trust in news has been eroded more at a national level than locally.

How worried should we be about AI?

It’s disturbing when you record an expert on artificial intelligence (AI) saying that he thinks the time before machines come to dominate us is reducing at a rapid rate. And discusses the odds of AI making us all extinct. But that’s what we heard from Geoff Hinton, sometimes known as the ‘godfather of AI’ when I recorded an interview with him and presenter Jack Stilgoe in London for the Radio 4 documentary ‘How Real is the Existential Threat from AI?’ which was broadcast in March.

After Geoff Hinton left Google and he says he worries that AI’s rapid development could turn into a threat to all of us.

In the documentary, Jack Stilgoe asks Geoff Hinton whether the concern about AI as an extinction threat is used at the expense of more immediate worries about jobs and copyright.

If Joe Biden is in Trouble - have we been here before?

Seven years ago this month, November, I was in New York, heading to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where Hillary Clinton’s campaign was preparing a huge celebratory party making her victory in the 2016 Presidential election. The venue was a massive convention centre, with a huge stage for later in the evening, and another hall full of the world’s media.

I’m reminded of this as I read the latest opinion polling from the New York Times.

Biden is in trouble, according to the polls, lagging behind Donald Trump in five of six key swing states - if the election, scheduled for next November, were to happen today, Trump would win.

Back in 2016 I took a walk through Manhattan on my way to the Javits Center - down Fifth Avenue, past Trump Tower, protected by a line of trucks, past the NBC election coloured Rockefeller Center, towards the turning where a crowd were watching as cars swung into a side street. It was Hillary Clinton arriving at her election night hotel, The Peninsula. I struck up a conversation with a woman who was leaning over the barrier holding back the small crowd. She showed me a picture of Hillary on her phone, so I assumed she would be a Clinton voter. I was wrong.

A few hours later, the suspicion that a lot of people had made similar decisions, to support Donald Trump, was confirmed when the TV screens in the Javits press centre broadcast an ABC election alert.

And hours later, Trump was celebrating on the stage at the Hilton Hotel - afterwards I interviewed one of his surrogates, a Staten Island Republican called Joe Borelli, who had been at the party.

I left the Javits Center in the early hours and before I got to sleep was called by the BBC editor in London - we talked about how the programme I was working on - How to Win a US Election - would now be quite different. Here it is:

How to Win a US Election

So when I read that Joe Biden is in trouble, it’s difficult not to think we may have been here before. With the consensus that had emerged in 2016, and a story that unexpectedly changed. Does that mean the polls could be wrong - and Joe Biden is not as vulnerable as they make him out to be? On the same day that these polls came out Donald Trump appeared in a civil fraud trial in New York talking about valuations on his Trump Tower and other properties and calling the trial ‘very unfair’. If Joe Biden is in Trouble - despite Donald Trump potentially spending almost as much time in court as he will on the campaign trail in coming months - does that mean it seems likely that next November we will be here again - once again - with a Trump win on election night?