Artificial Intelligence

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Zaneera Malik, whose focus is on the use of social media as a strategic political communication tool in the fragile democracy of Pakistan. The focus here is especially on the PTI party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, which lost the February 2024 election.

The next session at IAMCR 2024 starts with Svetlana Bodrunova, who introduces a methodological focus in the study of topic evolution in user talk on social media platforms. Key to this is the use of artificial intelligence tools.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on the propaganda of tomorrow. How might we democratise AI, and what does it mean for political systems?

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might still be able to find them. Out approaches now need to centre normative democratic commitments.

And the final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful T.J. Thomson, who has explored the use of AI in newsrooms for the past few years in a number of contexts. His present study interviewed journalists at major news outlets in five European countries and Australia, to explore the use of generative visual AI in news production as well as the policies and principles surrounding it.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yanning Chen, whose interest is in how journalists’ perceptions of AI affect their adoption of such tools. This draws on a survey of some 455 Chinese journalists, which sought to identify the utility value that these journalists perceived for AI tools, as well as their personal preferences related to the utilisation of these tools.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev; she notes that AI remains seen in a number of different ways by journalists, and attracts both positive and negative perceptions: it is seen as a valuable new tool, but also as something that could replace some journalistic jobs, and might affect the quality of journalistic converage. This is also affected by broader perceptions of AI in society, of course.

The next presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Brian So, whose interest is in how Bloomberg is using automated reporting to cover the financial results of Hong Kong-listed companies. Automated reporting has long been seen as supporting especially sports, financial, and weather reporting, since reporting there tends to follow very formalised patterns.

I’m sharing the next session at the ICA 2024 conference, and it starts with Anis Rahman, whose focus is on the use of AI in public media journalism. AI tools are largely emerging from major corporations in Global North countries; public media organisations are not doing a great deal of work in studying, exploring, or developing AI applications as yet, however. Here it is also important to distinguish between full generative AI tools and mere algorithms.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation.