ABU DHABI: Innovation in journalism is back and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence technologies is here to enhance journalists’ creative thinking and add more value to their work, rather than replace them, experts told the Global Media Congress on Wednesday.
“AI tools are being generated to add value and improve the quality of journalism. Newsrooms today are integrating newly generated AI functions, such as headline generation, summary content readers, avatar presenters, chatbots and language tools,” Prof. Neil Maidan explained during a panel discussion.
Arab media outlets present at the congress shared their positive experience with Arab News.
Ahmed Al-Hammadi, executive director of support services at WAM, described the UAE agency’s experience, saying: “It (AI) brings efficiency and creativity. It’s not a threat to journalists but an enhancement to their reporting.”
Al-Hammadi added: “Today, we are using different generative AI technologies at our news portal, (such as) a news summary tool that summarizes a two-page report into a few lines for our readers, a morning and evening voice news report, generated by AI tools, so people can listen while driving, and our avatar, who speaks 19 languages, tells news portal visitors all the breaking news.”
Regarding the threats and fears of using AI-generated reporting, Al-Hammadi emphasized that human intelligence and judgment are still needed. “We are a national news agency, so we did exclude generative AI tools from news reports covering politics, excellencies and state decisions. This way we are making sure the news we publish is precise and not misinforming,” he said.
AI technologies will play a major role in the media and will be a major tool in enhancing creativity, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al-Olama told the congress. He said: “Generative artificial intelligence systems will contribute soon to the development of more than 90 percent of internet content. The spread of AI will affect creativity and those who today adhere to the truth will have greater credibility than others in the future, so it is necessary to employ artificial intelligence positively.”
The Al-Ain news platform, based in the UAE, has created its own virtual writer, “Aref Bin Teqani,” who contributes a weekly AI-generated article covering different fields, with minimal errors.
“AI presents for us a very new way to gather news and use the news in a different and very fast way. In this moment, I think it is too early to talk about these concerns (AI’s threat to human jobs) because still the humans are controlling the AI,” said Al-Ain’s Seza Armenazi. She added that the newspaper does edit Aref’s pieces, but the changes are minimal and are usually due to old information that is not updated online.
“We are trying to get the maximum benefit from AI technology and I think we always should not be standing in front of the changes,” Armenazi said. “It is helping us to reach information in a very fast way and also helping the journalist to avoid some repeated work taking a lot of their time, helping us to focus on other subjects.”
Abdullah Al-Sharhan, head of the creative department at Sharjah Media City, told Arab News that, as much as AI can be beneficial, a regulator is needed to avoid the production of fake news.
He explained that Sharjah Media City had used AI to create a virtual presenter when a real presenter was late for his show. “We used AI to generate an image of him in the studio and we used AI to teach him the voice pattern of our friend. (The virtual presenter) covered the first 10 minutes of the session and no one noticed, even after the real presenter took his place.”
Al-Sharhan explained that this experience led them to create a deepfake and that is when a red flag appeared. He said: “There were errors, from the lip-syncing to the head movement. We fixed them and we reached what they call a deepfake. Do we think people have to use it? No, I think there should be an authorized operator for these things because it might be something dangerous if people deepfake news.”
