And the final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful T.J. Thomson, who has explored the use of AI in newsrooms for the past few years in a number of contexts. His present study interviewed journalists at major news outlets in five European countries and Australia, to explore the use of generative visual AI in news production as well as the policies and principles surrounding it.

Key challenges that the (predominantly visually focussed) journalists identified here included the use of AI-generated images to mislead and deceive audiences (for instance in the current war in Gaza) …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yanning Chen, whose interest is in how journalists’ perceptions of AI affect their adoption of such tools. This draws on a survey of some 455 Chinese journalists, which sought to identify the utility value that these journalists perceived for AI tools, as well as their personal preferences related to the utilisation of these tools.

This is also a matter of social projection, where people make judgments about the views about others who are similar to them; Chinese journalists, like journalists elsewhere, form a professional group cohort that is relatively homogenous …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev; she notes that AI remains seen in a number of different ways by journalists, and attracts both positive and negative perceptions: it is seen as a valuable new tool, but also as something that could replace some journalistic jobs, and might affect the quality of journalistic converage. This is also affected by broader perceptions of AI in society, of course.

The present study examined these attitudes amongst journalists, to evaluate their sociology-technical imaginaries for these new technologies. Such imaginaries are often dichotomous, and the choice between positive and …

The next presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Brian So, whose interest is in how Bloomberg is using automated reporting to cover the financial results of Hong Kong-listed companies. Automated reporting has long been seen as supporting especially sports, financial, and weather reporting, since reporting there tends to follow very formalised patterns.

Financial news is numbers-intensive, requires utmost accuracy, and highly repetitive, with earnings reports and regular updates put out by companies. News organisations tend to claim that their use of automated tools is not meant to replace journalists altogether, but to expand the scope of formalised coverage …

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation. He extracted similar data from the Google AI TV Explorer dataset.

Separately, he took 12,000 images addressing racism from …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Giada Marino, presenting some of the work of the Vera.ai research project. Responding to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, the project focusses especially on the coordinated communication networks that share such content in order to influence and manipulate social media audiences, and has developed a content-agnostic tool that monitors the activities of identified problematic accounts.

This currently works with CrowdTangle data, and is therefore under threat from the impending closure of the CrowdTangle data. Monitoring lists of problematic accounts derived from Meta alerts, it gathers up to …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is the annual Steve Jones lecture, which this year is presented by my QUT colleague Jean Burgess and is on the impact of the newly emerging generative artificial intelligence technologies. This should not be confused with the substantial hype around artificial general intelligence, a technology which always seems to be just around the corner and has yet to actually eventuate.

Rather, this talk is about the more limited generative AI systems that appear to have invaded all sorts of projects, and seem to be universally indicated now by sparkle (✨) icons and …

The post-lunch session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending has been organised by the Global Journalism Innovation Lab (GJIL) project, and focusses on AI-generated content in the news. Elizabeth Dubois starts us off by defining generative AI as a type of artificial intelligence system which is capable of generating text, images, and other media in response to prompts. Such generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate new data that have similar characteristics.

Michelle Bartleman now takes over by presenting an updated systematic literature review of journalism scholarship on automated …