In this issue: Rethinking journalism from first principles at the Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen, existential questions for the humanities (and newsrooms), and two insights from Laurens Vreekamp.
The Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen wrapped up, urging us to think bigger.
“What would we create if building information systems from scratch?” asked Newsroom Robots host Nikita Roy, proposing a first-principles rethink of journalism.
Helsingin Sanomat’s Erja Yläjärvi claimed “writing is not a core skill for most journalists in the very near future”, while Futurist Sofie Hvitved imagined contextually-adapting “liquid content”. BBC’s Naja Nielsen noted digital natives want something that speaks to their needs and preferences, just not a repackaged past.
It really is the death of the article, again.
Media’s transformation didn’t end with the print-to-digital shift. Quite the opposite. At the summit, our Nordic colleagues (who seem braver than most?) explored AI’s pitfalls and possibilities. (There is no other meeting like it. You can watch recordings on YouTube.)
VG’s Gard Steiro asked: Are we just tweaking the familiar, or reimagining what’s possible?
This reminded me of when Vice, BuzzFeed, and Refinery29 rolled into Germany. Local publishers responded with bento, ze.tt, Byou, and a few other now-forgotten brands.
Those names might not mean much today, but the lessons from that era? Still paying off. Publishers learned how to care for new audiences, experiment with content, tech, and distribution. And they built teams of some seriously talented people along the way.
Time to disrupt ourselves before AI does it for us. The stakes are higher than BuzzFeed quizzes.
What a coincidence: Ludwig Siegele is starting an AI Lab at The Economist and is offering a one-year fellowship as technical lead in London.
Speaking of existential questions: The New Yorker is doing a really great job right now of pushing the conversation about AI and knowledge professions in a smart, forward-thinking direction. Latest example: An article about the humanities by D. Graham Burnett.
“On campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: ‘We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.’ This is, simply, madness.”
“In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar.”
“Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.”
I think companies and newsrooms would be wise to speak very openly about AI and these questions, without needing to have all the answers ready right away. It would be disastrous if no real debate takes place due to fear or lack of knowledge.
Also in the New Yorker and equally worth reading: Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough? and Will A.I. Save the News?
