AI may eventually replace journalists, claims German publisher Axel Springer
As the firm prepares to make job losses at German newspapers Die Welt and Bild, the Politico owner advocates an emphasis on investigative journalism and original commentary
German publisher Axel Springer's CEO has claimed that journalists run the possibility of being replaced by ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems.
The publisher made the statement as it worked to increase profits at the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt and make the transition to becoming a "purely digital media company," reports The Guardian.
It warned of impending job losses since automation and AI were making many of the positions necessary to the creation of their journalism superfluous.
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"Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was – or simply replace it," CEO Mathias Doepfner said in an internal letter to employees.
According to him, AI tools like the well-known ChatGPT promise an "information revolution" and may soon be more effective than human journalists at "information aggregation."
"Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house's future viability," said Doepfner. "Only those who create the best original content will survive."
Although Axel Springer did not say how many employees would be let go, it did guarantee that the number of "reporters, authors, or specialised editors" would not be affected.
Doepfner wrote in his letter to the staff that media organisations should prioritise investigative reporting and original opinion while leaving it to journalists to determine the "real reasons" underlying occurrences.
The use of AI in content generation is not something that Axel Springer is the first news publisher to experiment with. BuzzFeed declared in January that it would employ AI to "improve" the quality of its articles and online tests.
The Daily Mirror and Daily Express newspapers in the United Kingdom are also investigating the usage of AI, forming a working committee to investigate "the possibilities and limitations of machine-learning such as ChatGPT," according to the group's chief executive.
Since its inception in November last year, ChatGPT has amassed more than 100 million users and accelerated a long-predicted reckoning about whether some jobs could be made redundant via artificial intelligence.
From simple user instructions, the programme can generate very complicated documents ranging from essays and job applications to poems and works of fiction. ChatGPT is a large-language model that was trained by ingesting billions of words of daily text from the internet. It then uses all of this information to anticipate words and phrases in specific sequences.
The authenticity of its responses, though, has been called into question. Australian academics discovered instances of the system generating references from websites and referring fictitious quotes.
The employment of AI in journalism has also been a source of contention.
CNET, a technology website, is said to have used an AI programme to write articles, which are then checked for correctness by human editors before publication. After a study from tech news site Futurism revealed that more than half of the pieces generated by AI tools had to be altered for inaccuracies, the website admitted in January that the programme had certain limits.
In one case, CNET was compelled to make significant changes to an instructional post on compound interest due to a number of basic errors.
