Responsible media technology and AI: challenges and research directions

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed major disruptions to the traditional media industry as a result of technological breakthroughs. New opportunities and challenges continue to arise, most recently as a result of the rapid advance and adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. On the one hand, the broad adoption of these technologies may introduce new opportunities for diversifying media offerings, fighting disinformation, and advancing data-driven journalism. On the other hand, techniques such as algorithmic content selection and user personalization can introduce risks and societal threats. The challenge of balancing these opportunities and benefits against their potential for negative impacts underscores the need for more research in responsible media technology. In this paper, we first describe the major challenges—both for societies and the media industry—that come with modern media technology. We then outline various places in the media production and dissemination chain, where research gaps exist, where better technical approaches are needed, and where technology must be designed in a way that can effectively support responsible editorial processes and principles. We argue that a comprehensive approach to research in responsible media technology, leveraging an interdisciplinary approach and a close cooperation between the media industry and academic institutions, is urgently needed.

Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis

“…News angles, in addition to signifying the newsworthiness of an event, also provide a predefined theme/structure to report the event. Similarly, some very recent works address the use of technology toward supporting journalistic practices using semi-automated news discovery tools (Diakopoulos et al, 2021 ), discuss responsible media technology use for personalized media experiences and news recommendation with automatic media content creation (Trattner et al, 2021 ), and propose the development of AI-augmented software to support citizen involvement in local journalism (Tessem et al, 2022 ). All these works position the use of recent breakthroughs in image recognition, natural language processing and other AI technologies for automated or semi-automated news discovery, content creation, and improving user interaction and accessibility.…”

Visual User-Generated Content Verification in Journalism: An Overview

“…Considering the importance of visual UGC verification, and the lack of available trustworthy tools and resources, media industry is joining hands with the research community to address these issues [149]. It is true that no automated verification tool can verify a piece of visual content with 100% accuracy [150] but tools can make the verification process more efficient by reducing the burden on the fact-checkers.…”

Use of Artificial Intelligence for the Generation of Media Content

“…Large platforms such as Facebook, aggregate content, and services more efficiently than traditional media can, capitalizing on user-generated content and algorithms to transform it predictively. In addition, major platforms now act as powerful channels for content distribution, while traditional media organizations have become content providers for these platforms (Trattner et al, 2022). In such a created realistic environment, responsible media must strengthen their position by highlighting its comparative advantages, through the reliability of information sources and ethics, as well as to strongly continue with the process of content personalization, according to the wishes and expectations of the target audience.…”

“…Advanced AI techniques are increasingly present in the design of hybrid workflows between media creators and AI, making that process visible through the analysis and creation of numerous and diverse media contents, starting from marking and selecting data, writing news, modeling comments, all the way to checking fact and content verification (Trattner et al, 2022).…”