A free press or media has an important role to play in democracies as it is responsible for gathering and distributing the information that citizens use to decide how they are going to vote. They then have the further responsibility to monitor and hold those in power accountable. Free press also plays a role in society by providing a platform for advocacy, expression of opinion and for society to create a shared understanding of the important issues and the best way to go about solving them. However, the mind-boggling amount of information that we have produced far exceeds any person or organisation’s ability to make sense of or moderate it. This has necessitated the use of automated tools that approximate human insight to produce, curate and moderate content at scale. How can AI benefit press and consumers?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can potentially aid a free press in fulfilling its role in society. It can assist journalists in researching and producing content. They can now, with AI, examine and understand vast amounts of unstructured data, quickly translate relevant texts, and transcribe and analyse video or audio content. The use of AI-generated content (for content that relies heavily on data and is mostly routine) can free up journalists’ time to focus on more complex and impactful content. This can also speed up the distribution of news to consumers, especially time sensitive news such as financial news.

Read this riveting article by Hanno Brink, Synthesis Machine Learning Engineer  in the May edition of EngineerIT