Google News founder Krisha Bharat says AI can provide journalists with ‘superpowers’ provided they have access to the required resources — data scientists, high-end computing time, and AI models. Availability could be a concern, especially for smaller news operations.
His comments are in a wide-ranging interview for The GLOBAL EDITORS NETWORK.
Bharat foresees AI-enabled news applications such as:
- AI systems interacting with people as journalists do, with machines using speech recognition and speech synthesis, enabling interviewing ‘at scale’
- Having intelligent assistants ‘co-present’ for interviews and conversation
- Pooling knowledge from ‘thousands’ of sources, both inside and outside a news organization
I think scaling will allow for better journalism, on more topics, and in greater depth.
As well as future applications, the interview covers
- Transparency in AI systems
- New skills sets for journalists
- Contributions to democracy from AI in journalism
- Effects of the proposed EU copyright provisions
- ‘Winner-take-all’ scenarios and the potential for an AI arms race
Bharat founded Google News in the aftermath of the September 11 attack in New York City. He is an advisor to two tech companies to Columbia Journalism School and the Knight Foundation. Bharat will give a keynote address at the upcoming GEN Summit.