Adam Turner, freelance technology journalist and columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, on the labyrinthine landscape of artificial intelligence reporting in Australia.
“The problem is that a lot of technology reporting is done by people who aren’t specialists.” Photo: Supplied.
The skills gap between understanding and reporting on artificial intelligence, or AI, is a key trend to watch in 2022, according to a report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Adam Turner, Australian freelance technology journalist and columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, says there’s an issue with what journalists know about how AI works and how much they care about the technology.
“The problem is that a lot of technology reporting is done by people who aren’t specialists,” Turner says. “Even if they are tech specialists, they don’t have the level of expertise to really understand the details of what they’re looking at.”
He says that pre-existing biases surrounding the ethical implications of AI also means that some journalists “don’t care that they don’t understand the technology” when they’ve already decided to write a scare piece.
Editor-in-chief for The New Stack, Joab Jackson, says there aren’t enough technology reporters who understand how AI technology works at the trade level globally, even in specialist tech journalism.
He says tech journalists “don’t have much in the way of support from the IT trade press” on the technical details of AI technology, and the trade journalism “tends not to get into the ethical considerations of the technologies they cover.”
Jackson says that weakens journalists’ ability to do their job of holding tech companies to account.
“It certainly is difficult to hold tech firms accountable if you don’t know which questions to ask,” he says. “This involves making publications and online news outlets responsible for creating space in their lineups for these beats.”
U.S. non-profit tech newsroom The Markup offers an example of an approach to future AI reporting with its Citizen Browser project. It features investigative publications about Facebook’s algorithmic biases using in-house data collection and code built from scratch.
Data journalism is the use of structured data to tell stories in the public interest, but is still to become a core component of mainstream journalism education.
Analysing data requires some level of data understanding and scientific training while generating data yourself requires both analytical skills and specialist coding and programming skills.
Jackson says most reporters have few, if any, programming skills. “Those with programming skills can find higher paid work elsewhere.”
The skills gap in reporting literacy results in an over-simplification of technical reporting on AI, with some journalists lacking the necessary skills to evaluate key AI-related issues like algorithmic bias, ethics and regulation.
Turner says the problem is that journalists can “do a certain amount of research to understand the fundamentals but they’re never going to know as much as the experts”.
He says this means tech giants like Google and Facebook can use their own reporting mechanisms to distract from the “most powerful part of their technology”, which is “what’s under the bonnet” or concealed from the public eye.
Put simply, AI is an umbrella term used to describe the field of research that looks at simulating human intelligence in machines to solve problems.
Broadly, AI encompasses four main elements including acting humanly, thinking humanly, thinking rationally, and acting rationally, with most current AI systems including aspects of each element.
Shrouded in growing hype and speculation, AI repeatedly appears in yearly tech trend predictions, boasting revolutionary change for almost every industry on a global scale.
Although it’s not a new field with many industries already capitalising on early AI tech, AI’s potential is mostly uncharted territory with social, ethical and human rights concerns lagging behind the advancing technology.
Reporting on these issues remains a core challenge for the future of AI journalism in this rapid technological evolution.
Featured image: AI boasts revolutionary change for global industries. Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.
