DECEMBER 2020CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8IN MYOPINIONith Fake News becoming an ever-growing problem, and trust in the media being eroded as a result, it is perfectly understandable that journalists have some fear and scepticism when the subject of Artificial Intelligence is raised. After all, AI has the capacity to generate the kind of fake news which is the bane of the industry, while the technology's growing ability to create valuable content leaves many journalists feeling vulnerable about their jobs.As a former journalist who now works in product development, I can fully understand this view. I remember technologists imposing solutions on teams in the past, often with a mandate to change working practices to support a new product or system. These changes tended to land badly as people found ways to resist them. Attempts to introduce change today still seem to be beset by this reluctance to embrace the new, and so AI-driven transformation in newsrooms is slow. Nevertheless, AI offers enormous opportunities to the journalism industry, in two distinct ways ­ the automation of tasks which would otherwise be done manually, and the ability to create content which would not be possible without the assistance of AI.Automating manual tasks frees up people's time to do more exciting and valuable work. Automated transcription is one area which can benefit journalists. It can process in minutes a task which might otherwise take hours and dramatically speeds up the writing of articles or video subtitles or aids with production and research. AI continuously improves this process by learning specific terminology pertinent to individual users and by improving its understanding of accents, such as foreign speakers of English, a particular issue with the Premier League, for example.The use of Computer Vision, specifically object recognition, has significant benefits in the areas of research and archiving. Currently, large image or video archives can be hard to search when looking for specific items. Computer vision is able to find and log all manner of things which appear on the screen and then make them searchable, meaning that if someone is looking for a particular type of dog, or a specific time that a celebrity appeared in a particular location, all of that information can be stored and then found swiftly. HUGH WESTBROOK, SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, SKYWJournalismAut matedHUGH WESTBROOK
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