The festival is just around the corner, and here’s my annotated list of sessions focusing on AI and journalism that I plan to attend – and where you’ll likely find me.
- The session on the ideology behind AI (Captured). Thursday, 11:30 – 12:20, Auditorium San Francesco al Prato. With Natalia Antelava, Coda Story, Isobel Cockerell, Coda Story, Julie Posetti, International Center for Journalists, Christopher Wylie, whistleblower and author. Why am I going? Honestly, for entertainment. This promises to be amusing while addressing a serious topic: who ultimately benefits more from AI.
- The Elon Musk Twitter experiment and what we can learn from it (News or noise?). Saturday, 9:30 – 10:20, Sala Raffaello, Hotel Brufani. With David Caswell, StoryFlow, Shuwei Fang, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Paul Matzko, Cato Institute, Murielle Popa-Fabre, Council of Europe. The idea is that the new AI-powered Twitter functions as a public sphere and a fact machine, entirely without journalists. Why am I going? The news ecosystem is changing, and smart people here are thinking about what that means.
- The big picture (After the hype). Friday, 11:30 – 12:20, Sala Brugnoli, Palazzo Cesaroni. With Charlie Beckett, London School of Economics, Gina Chua, Semafor, Ezra Eeman, NPO, and Karen Hao, journalist and author of “Empire of AI”, an inside look at OpenAI, out May 20th. From the descriptions, this sounds like the panel that covers the current state of affairs, trends, themes, the bad, and the good. Why am I going? AI is transforming knowledge-based professions, knowledge transfer, and the news ecosystem. And we’re right in the middle of it.
- The “we need to talk about this” session (Now the hard part). Saturday, 14:00 – 14:50, Teatro del Pavone. With Rubina Madan Fillion, New York Times, Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal, Chris Moran, Guardian, Felix Simon, Reuters Institute. This session will focus on evaluation and “actual accuracy, editorial quality, safety, and bias” – essentially the opposite of “someone tried some random prompt, and it works fine.” Why am I going? Sounds like a session that will stay on my mind for a long time.
- The Google session (AI tools for journalists). Thursday, 14:00 – 14:50, Sala Raffaello, Hotel Brufani. With Etan Horowitz from Google. Focusing on NotebookLM and other useful tools for journalists. I like NotebookLM, I think Pinpoint is great, and Gemini is exciting – but the immediate question arises about security and data protection.
- There are two sessions which basically sound like “See what the news agency dpa has built with you.com (an event sponsor)” – focusing on RAG and prompts for the newsroom. dpa already has its AI-powered search live. At SPIEGEL, we’ve built something similar – a RAG-based search and the ability to work with the findings, such as creating FAQs or timelines. I’m particularly interested in the feedback from dpa’s clients and their initial learnings, especially regarding incomplete answers and hallucinations. And whatever happened to the Microsoft-Semafor collaboration on AI-assisted news content? The overview: dpa, you.com, RAG (Journalism in the age of AI). Thursday, 16:00 – 16:50, Sala Raffaello, Hotel Brufani. With Charlie Beckett, London School of Economics, Gina Chua, Semafor, Astrid Maier, dpa, Richard Socher, you.com. The technical deep dive: dpa and you.com (Building AI for newsrooms). Saturday, 10:30 – 11:20, Sala Raffaello, Hotel Brufani. With Richard Socher, you.com, and Stefan Voss, dpa.
- The “What users really want and what helps our business” session (Shaping the future). Saturday, 11:30 – 12:20, Sala Brugnoli, Palazzo Cesaroni. With Alessandro Alviani, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mariah Craddick, The Atlantic, Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots, Martin Stabe, Financial Times, Anita Zielina, Better Leaders Lab. This session promises to focus on user trust – something urgently needed in times of soulless AI content and AI slop. I’m looking forward to it!
(Shorter version published on LinkedIn.)
