Are human journalists irreplaceable? Beware of newsrooms that keep optimizing for speed and scale while telling themselves they’re building something human-centric. (Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Reuters Institute)
- Agnes Stenbom Swedling, a doctoral researcher at KTH Stockholm, argues that most newsrooms claim to pursue human-centric AI but are actually building machine-centric workflows optimized for speed, scale, and cost efficiency.
- She distinguishes between first-order AI affordances (automation, efficiency) and second-order ones (moral judgment, narrative construction), arguing that human-centric AI strategy should actively foreground the latter.
- The piece is a useful prompt to audit your own newsroom: not whether you have an AI policy, but whether your actual workflows are designed around what humans genuinely do best.
