A few quick tidbits on AI and journalism, based on a recent seminar arranged by The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) on Norwegian media and AI.

New AI-powered title generator

On the day of the debate, Labrador CMS announced the launch of its advanced AI-powered title generator at the PPA Festival held on Tuesday, April 25, at The Brewery in London – a UK version of the story, Journalisten.no on the launch (Labrador is lead by key former NONA-folks)

“A few thousand reporters will soon have direct access to machine learning writing support in CMS. This is one of the coolest things by delivering a SaaS Publishing Platform. When we roll out new functions, we do it to all customers. The latest function is to integrate directly with Open AI and suggest better titles to the story and then automatically send them to A/B test,” said Jan Thoresen, CEO, Labrador CMS.

“Journalists won’t be replaced by AI, but by journalists who know how to utilize AI,” laughed Inga Strümke, Associate professor in AI at NTNU and author of a popular, recently published, and currently sold out, book on AI “Maskiner som tenker”, at the end of her talk at the NONA-event.

Though it seems from the debate (which I watched via live stream) this might have been a conclusion derived from, or shared with, other key people in the audience (such as Torgeir Waterhouse) before the debate. You can still see the live stream on Facebook here, though the debate is in Norwegian (starts roughly 15-16min into the recording)

She also said the recent call to pause AI development is an ineffective way of dealing with the issue, but that we are in dire need of proper regulation of AI. She said the EU’s proposed AI act is an interesting piece of proposed legislation to follow in this respect.

As of last Thursday, Strümke's non-fiction book on AI was in fact Norway's most selling book.

Another interesting thought I made a note of from the seminar was this:

“I think there’s a lack of wider journalism about AI. Now it's being covered as a cool new thing. But I’m concerned with how it is already affecting us – e. g. Snapchat's My AI is in the pockets of very many people now, also very many young people. What kind of effects does it have?,” said Janni Frederiksen Kalafatis, UX lead in Schibsted-owned VG. Among other things, he’s been central to the development of the transcription tool JOJO and AI-generated article summaries.

As a former tech reporter I always thought covering tech should be about a lot more than just the cool new, new thing/gadget and its specifications: technology and the way it is used has so many ramifications for society as a whole (not only new tech, but also old and bad IT solutions that we’ve seen get in the way of effective legislation or even effective health care).

So it will be vital to see journalism about AI move beyond the new cool thing phase. In fact, I have read about international media hiring AI reporters. Googling, I find Muck Rack has this list of 10 top AI in 2023 – and it seems like a good list to explore. Speaking for myself, I am only familiar with the work of Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at Financial Times, as of writing.

Inga Strümke, Photo: Mona Haugli / Kagge Forlag