While media should explore in detail the promise and pitfalls of AI, they would be well served to treat it less as a world-shaking revolution and more as a set of technologies in the process of being designed, a set of choices in the process of being made, and a set of problems in the process of being collectively solved.
from the conclusions
Practices are wanting in how the UK media is covering AI, finds The Reuters Insititute for the Study of Journalism.
SUMMARY
- There is a preponderance of industry sourcing, little notice of debates about AI effects, and early signs that coverage clusters by political orientation.
- Right-leaning newsrooms tended to cover automation, national security and investment.
- Left-leaning news outlets were more likely to cover ethics, privacy, and algorithmic bias.
- Findings are based on six U.K. mainstream news organizations studied over eight months in 2018.
FROM THE CONCLUSIONS
- ‘…importance of including a wider range of voices in discussions of AI. Academics, activists, politicians, civilians, and civil servants, amongst others, can all contribute to a rich and sophisticated public debate around AI.’
- ‘… important for news outlets to explicitly recognise the legitimately different political interpretations of what AI is and ought to be.’
- ‘…as AI develops as a public issue, it is necessary to interrogate its relation to many other realms beyond technology, including politics, economics, and health.’
TEXT-ON-VIDEO SUMMARY
REPORT AUTHORS
- J. Scott Brennen
- Philip N. Howard
- Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
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