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Ranga Mataire, Group Political Editor

JUST like the time when typewriters were replaced by computers, journalists found themselves in some kind of trepidation in fear of being replaced by this know it all machine. And when the Internet developed and progressed, much anxiety gripped the media industry as the days of monopolising news production and dissemination came to an end.

And now we are in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), where we are likely to see newsreaders and presenters being replaced by phantom presenters. More anxiety has once again gripped the “best profession” in the world. What will save journalism or the media industry at a time when audiences are now accessing all sorts of news or information at a click of a button?

This was the discussion at last week’s Media Alliance Strategy Stakeholders Conference Validation of the media strategy for Zimbabwe held in Harare, where most presenters painted a gloomy picture of the media’s sustainability in light of AI and the proliferation of social media platforms all claiming to be news platforms.

Only Dr Alexander Rusero, an academic, refused to go by the herd mentality when he challenged the pervading sense of hopelessness among the participants. In Dr Rusero’s view, the media has nothing to fear, but to stay on course as the purveyors of authentic, credible, relevant news.

 Dr Rusero said while many are celebrating the advent of AI as an enhancing tool in the practice of journalism, there was a need for circumspect, as the global south appears to be mere receivers of what’s fed to them by the global north. His concern was the absence of input by the global south in the creation of AI.

AI, he said, must remind people of the maladjusted information flow and exchange between the global north and south. He reminded participants of the old-age call for New World Information and Communication Order (Nwico). Nwico was a political proposal concerning media and communication issues emerging from international debates in the late 1970s. The debate on the need for a new international economic order was very much vibrant within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and became the expression of the aspirations of many countries in the global south, to democratise the international communication system and rebalance information flows worldwide.

Unesco played a big role in fostering the debate through the work of an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat, Sean MacBride’s report – “Many voices, one world” (1980/2004), which outlined the challenges in communication and summarised Nwico’s basic philosophical thrust. The report was adopted at the 21st general conference of Unesco in Belgrade (1980) and still remains a milestone in the history of global debates around the communication issues.  

The main concern of countries in the global south then and now, was that the continued imbalanced flow of information will perpetuate cultural imperialism and maintain the rider and horse scenario that existed during colonialism. In short, the imbalance in the flow of information has the effect of brainwashing impressionable minds in the global south, to think that the north is the standard bearer of all things. But many years have passed since the adoption of the Nwico report and that imbalance is now even more pronounced than before. This is why people like Dr Rusero are less celebratory of AI in that Africans have no control over it. But is Dr Rusero refusing to evolve and appreciate the reality of AI in transforming the media terrain?

The answer lies in treating the media as a business. As a business, the media has no choice but to embrace AI and innovate around it, for it to survive.

Writing for Al Jazeera in June 2023, award winning journalist, writer and blogger, Khalid Diab says there is a need to acknowledge that AI has been the major cause of tectonic shifts in the media landscape for quite some years already and this occurred directly and indirectly.

“One direct and largely positive way in which AI has affected the media is the emergence of Big Data journalism, which covers everything from crunching through the data in big leaks like the Panama Papers to examining the consequences of the climate crisis. Without powerful algorithms, journalists would have likely not been able to successfully comb through and decipher the mountains of data at their disposal, to identify the telling statistical patterns and use these to tell compelling and useful stories,” says Diab, as he defends technological advances that have brought AI into the fold.

Diab like Dr Rusero, however, raises pertinent concerns about lamely embracing AI. Diabi is concerned by the fact that with the release of sophisticated large language models, the media industry is on the cusp of AI moving out of the peripheries and penetrating the very heart and soul of journalism: content creation.

Indeed, just as sophisticated language communication is central to our identity as humans, writing or speaking or storytelling is possibly the defining feature of being a journalist for many of us who took up the gauntlet.

Many journalists attest to the fact that it was their deep fascination with human stories that drew them to the profession. For a journalist, nothing beats the delight nor match the frustration of fashioning a coherent and captivating story or narrative out of a heap of ideas, words and information.

I know for sure that in Zimbabwe, some journalists have experimented with Chabots, but the bots are from being widely applied in editing text because for many, it still gives them great professional satisfaction to do it themselves. Many do not fully trust the tools to do a proper job and like someone said, using a bot would be tantamount to a chef offering guests a microwave meal.

Writing an article, producing a video or radio report might seem strenuous, but it is an extremely fulfilling act, which when done well, pays huge dividends for the journalist and the audience. It is very doubtful that the advent of machine learning will ever affect interest in and demand for high quality, credible, human-generated journalism.

This is what I found missing in the Media Alliance of Zimbabwe meeting. Stakeholders skirted around or completely forgot that at the core of good journalism is the issue of ethics, standards and high quality journalism, which must always withstand pressures associated with artificially generated content.

It is my fervent submission that the demand for quality and well-researched content will remain, but the media industry has to be highly innovative in finding ways of selling that content. I know the immediate reaction of captains of the media would be to chop the human resources to cut costs to remain viable, but there is little doubt that humans will remain at the core of the process of credible journalism.

A rapid and unstudied dash to deploy AI in the newsrooms has its own consequences on accuracy and the danger is that AI Chabots rarely admit ignorance, but will actually invent facts. Many times I have tested ChatGPT’s accuracy by asking it to write a biography of me and what I got was shocking. It said Ranga Mataire was an award winning journalist who has won numerous regional awards and is an author of books on Pan-Africanism. Though I have won awards when I was still a student, political writing rarely has any awards sponsored and though I am an avowed Pan-Africanist I am yet to put pen to paper to write a book on the subject.

Until these grave errors are sorted, AI’s use in journalism remains risky and irresponsible, especially as properly fact-checking texts could potentially take as long as researching them in the first place. In addition, applying AI to generate and curate highly personalised content could have unintended consequences of narrowing people’s world views. I also doubt that real interviews with actual sources can ever be replaced by AI. ChatGPT itself is not secret about the potential risks as it has warned users: “If news consumption becomes highly personalised and driven by algorithms, there is a risk of narrowing the diversity of perspectives and limiting exposure to contrasting viewpoints, potentially leading to echo chambers.” An echo chamber is “an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect or reinforce their own.”

Just like Dr Rusero warned, over reliance on AI systems can potentially lead to a situation in which we would not know when it is misleading us or leading us astray and it can perpetuate prejudices or even create new ones, and unless we question and analyse everything it does, this could happen without us even being aware of it.

The other concern is that there are going to be more potential risks for AI granting bad-faith actors an opportunity to propagate propaganda and misinformation for everyone – extremists and radicals with vested interests. Deepfake technology has become so powerful that it can even undermine or upset the concept of a common reality.

But AI usage is not all gloomy. Like all other digital technologies that have come before it, AI definitely brings along a democratisation of some sorts by lowering the cost barriers and empowering small outfits to channel their limited resources towards work that really matters and produce good output.

Media organisations need to see AI not as a displacement tool, but complementary. Waning areas of investigative and documentary journalism can be revived. If staff levels are kept the same or made higher, then AI can truly serve to alleviate human journalists of some of the toil of their work, freeing them to go out into the world and report on it in-depth and humanely.

For the media industry to get the most out of AI, the process cannot be guided solely by profit-driven tech companies dominated by a few billionaires. Every ethical, social and environmental aspect must be considered first and, in the true spirit of democracy, decisions about the future role of artificial intelligence in society need to involve everyone because it affects us all.

As a way forward, the media industry needs to take seriously the recommendations contained in the Reuters Digital News Report of 2023, which came against the backdrop of a global cost-of-living crisis, continuing war in the heart of Europe, and further climate instability across the world.

Reuters key findings include the need for a strong supply of accurate information that distinguishes itself from the chaff that dominates social media platforms, funding journalism to boost levels of trust and revive engagement with the audience.

Ultimately, mainstream media needs to rebuild trust with its audiences for it to remain relevant and as a sustainable industry. Urgent collective multi-stakeholder action is needed to rebuild trust in the media ecosystem, tackle disinformation and promote media information literacy.