Robo-journalism: the third threat

World Scientific Publishing, 2018

The book addresses the questions: can the machine (AI) brain can be more creative than the human brain?; What the human journalist must do to win the war with the robot journalist; how the new automatic newsroom will look like, and how the new technologies including Immersive technologies (the Metaverse…) will affect journalistic story telling. The book was translated to Chinese by Tsinghua University Press.

World Scientific, 2018

The book addresses the questions: can the machine (AI) brain can be more creative than the human brain?; What the human journalist must do to win the war with the robot journalist; how the new automatic newsroom will look like, and how the new technologies including Immersive technologies (the Metaverse…) will affect journalistic story telling. The book was translated to Chinese by Tsinghua University Press.

2020

A new idiom "Robot Journalism" was created recently, meaning the use of robots in making journalistic content. 75% of media platforms, according to a study prepared by Reuters, have started using artificial intelligence in a real way to create content that forms the backbone of the media ( 1 ) ,The developer of one of the first robot journalist story writers, Kristian Hammond of Narrative Science, predicted that 90 % of the journalistic stories would be written by robots within 5–10 years. Ray Kurtzweil predicted that by the year 2040 computers will outsmart the human brain, at a point known as the "technological singularity" ( 2 ) .

NORDSCI International Conference on Social Sciences : Conference Proceedings. Book 1 / Vol. 2 : Sections Education and Educational Research, History, Language and Linguistics, Philosophy, Sociology and Healthcare, 2019

Due to the development of artificial intelligence and language-based software, automatic machines, which can generate news contents from data, are starting to be used in the editorial practice. Despite the fact that this field of editorial work is currently at its advent, it has been developing and improving relatively quickly. At present, robots for production of contents are implemented in editorial offices of large media, and are able to process huge amounts of data, while saving journalists' work. Robo-journalism, which is the result of an effective interconnection among informatics, statistics and reporting, is being vividly discussed not only in media practice, but also in professional circles. The study deals with robot journalism that uses intelligent software to produce news articles. Its application fundamentally redefines editorial routines, journalistic practices and existing models of editorial work. Media and journalism theorists are interested in the influence of robo-journalism on the editing process, the journalistic profession, the journalist as a creative person and their competences. The authors of the paper intend to broaden the awareness of this dynamically developing segment of new coverage and to point out its selected aspects in relation to media practice, but also theoretical reflection.

The advent of new technologies has always spurred questions about changes in journalism – its content, its means of production, and its consumption. A quite recent development in the realm of digital journalism is software-generated content, i.e. automatically produced content. Companies such as Automated Insights offer services that, according to themselves “humanizes big data sets by spotting patterns, trends and key insights and describing those findings in plain English that is indistinguishable from that produced by a human writer” (Automated Insights, 2012). This paper seeks to investigate how readers perceive software-generated content in relation to similar content written by a journalist. The study utilizes an experimental methodology where respondents were subjected to different news articles that were written by a journalist or software-generated. The respondents were then asked to answer questions about how they perceived the article; its overall quality, credibility, objectiveness etc. The paper presents the results from a first small-scale study and they indicate that the software-generated content is perceived as, for example, descriptive, boring and objective, but not necessarily discernable from content written by journalists. The paper discusses the results of the study and its implication for journalism practice.

The 3rd Open Society Conference, 2021

Major media corporations in the West have begun to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to write news. In Indonesia, news site Beritagar.id is the first to use AI to write news. Is "artificial intelligence" technological development the final sign of human role as news reporters? For science fiction genre film fans, Skynet artificial intelligence or AI system is familiar in the Terminator trilogy. Determinism of technology can be interpreted as due to the influence of technological developments. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the presence of cyber media and citizen journalism movement directly or indirectly impacts the media that has been considered the ruler of information production and distribution. This condition occurs because the internet provides easy access to citizens by accessing information, producing information, and even producing news produced, causing the pattern of social democracy to change.

Ufuk Üniversitesi II. Sosyal Bilimler Kongresi, 2023

Throughout history, journalism, like other professions, has evolved with technology. As Karl Marx put it, capitalism cannot exist without continuously reproducing the means of production. There have been significant blows dealt to the journalism profession and press workers throughout the world and Turkey after the 19th century, the second industrial revolution, electrification, and the postfordist economy's spread of flexible production after the 1970s, and in parallel with this, the neo-liberal policies that have spread worldwide since 1980. Another blow to the labour market is artificial intelligence. The rollback of laws protecting press workers, especially in the last two decades with AKP policies, and the policies carried out as if officially declaring war on press workers have caused journalism to become a discredited profession or to turn into civil servants under the government's propaganda ministry. This study will discuss the evolution of the journalism profession in Turkey, the impact of artificial intelligence on this profession and what journalism will become in the future from the perspective of press workers. Press workers and the democratic forces of society, who cannot stand in front of capitalism, which must be limited in order to live humanely, becoming as brutal in recent years as it was in its early years, will discuss how they can form a force against this new stage of the profession, robot journalism. It will be shown that if these press workers fail to take a position against media companies and capitalists, the journalism profession and journalists will become propaganda agents of the state, just like the AKP's pool of media today. In journalism, where artificial intelligence will come into play, one cannot even talk about pens becoming for sale. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, robot journalism, propaganda, capitalism, state, exploitation

Algorithmic journalism is “the step-by-step or statistical procedures by which information is translated from data into natural language text.” (Caswell & Dörr, 2017, p. 18). Besides algorithmic journalism, machine-generated content is also referred to as automated journalism, quantitative journalism, algorithmic journalism or robot journalism. (Anderson, 2012; Coddington, 2015; Caswell & Dörr, 2017) Companies like Narrative Science and Automated Insight are taking the lead in developing machine-generated content using Natural Language Generation (NLG). These newcomers emphasise that their purpose is not to replace human journalists but rather to provide a more sophisticated reporting engine that serves as a tool for journalists in their daily tasks. This paper examines questions that are raised in the media industry about this new technology by assessing its impact on the news-making process, the output, and the livelihoods of journalists and industry professionals.

DIGITAL FUTURE, 2021

Context, convey, message, communicate, communication.... Being applied communicators obliges us to examine each part of the communication process from different perspectives. At this point, the message and its carriers have always played the leading role. In my first book, Yeni Medya ve Dokunmatik Toplum, I critically evaluated how digital communication tools transform society and how smartphones we use as tools turn into main goals. We can now divide the world into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods. Before the pandemic, we were making suggestions such as we should reduce the use of technology and even apply a digital detox. We were constantly under- lining the need for digital minimalism and technology literacy. The concept of digital capitalism, which progressed rather slowly before the pandemic, gained momentum with the advent of the pandemic. By using almost all digital com- munication channels, we have been digitalized in many areas from economy to education, and to health. We were able to survive with digital communication opportunities and increased the problems that we thought we should reduce by using them even more.