Artificial intelligence, the future of media and the issues raised by its digital transformation. These themes resonated through this year's Czech Internet Forum 2024 organized by Internet Info. One of the most discussed contributions was a lecture by Josef Šlerka, a semiotician and head of New Media Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, whose vision of the future of media was largely apocalyptic.
Artificial intelligence is already a tool of journalists. It will transform the entire industry
"AI is not the future. It is a reality that is already working around us, " Josef Šlerka began, citing examples of the current use of AI in the media. "Whether it's writing perex, designing headlines, personalising content or moderating discussions, AI is already influencing the way media works. It's ubiquitous, we just don't often see it, " he said.
Abroad, the adoption of AI tools in journalism work is even more pronounced. Šlerka cited examples such as Heliograph, the system used by The Washington Post to automatically generate texts, and Klara, the German headline automation software. "In our country, AI is widely used in moderating toxic discussions or in content suggestions. For example, Seznam is moving to large-scale use of AI for detecting toxic content in discussions and adding information boxes to them, " said Shlerka. In recent weeks, Seznam.com has even added AI content summarization to discussions.
The use of AI in the Czech media environment was also discussed at CIF by representatives of major Czech media in a panel discussion, and we present a closer look at their main ideas in a separate box below.
As long as AI helps journalists to summarise content, analyse data or lay the structure of their writing, it is de facto a welcome facilitation of journalistic work. The double-edged sword, however, is that AI alone is capable of creating content that is readable by most audiences in the media space. Or rather, this raises the inevitable problem of overproduction of content. Even small players will be able to produce content similar to that of the big media houses - incidentally the phrase in question is not used by accident. According to Shlerka, it is already evident in many media houses' advertisements that they are looking for content producers rather than journalists.
For this reason, Shlerka warned against the unchecked rise of AI technology. "Search engines like Google or Seznam are paradoxically a big friend of journalism today because they penalize AI-generated content. The moment they stop doing that, they will actually loosen the floodgates of generated content flooding the internet," he warned, adding that this will lead to an unprecedented flood of information that no one will be able to process.
Higher risk of misinformation
"Automation will lead to a faster news cycle. If there are more of them, they will spin faster on the homepage, " Shlerka said, adding:
"The consequence will be that misinformation and disinformation will have pré. It won't be prosecuted. The ability to produce news is (with AI, ed. note) fascinatingly fast, the ability to verify it remains slow."
An unwelcome prospect is the projected decline not only of proofreading, but also of editorial roles, yet the consequences of their layoffs in recent years are already being felt.
The futuristic idea may be that just as we now have spam filters in email, we will have them in the browser for curating benign content.
Another solution to the curation of good content and the necessary survival model of quality journalism will be to increase the prevalence of paid content. Shlerk's guess is that we'll get to about 30% of readers willing to pay for content. "The younger generation will play a role in this. They're used to paying for Netflix. So why not pay for news," he asked rhetorically.
Paid media will be better able to cater to the pressure for quality and originality of content that would differ from AI outputs.
Market fragmentation and loss of a common framework
One of the main themes of Schlerk's talk was the fragmentation of the media market. "This is already happening today. Basically, there is no one big online media outlet that is the clear market leader... The main Seznam.cz site can deliver content from dozens of small sites to a large mass of readers. In doing so, they are competing for the same attention as the big players and are often not that far behind them in terms of quality, " said Josef Šlerka, adding a consequence that will be even more pronounced with the AI boom described above:
"Today, there is no medium that can unify the public debate. Public space as we knew it is disappearing, " he said. And this situation will understandably be compounded by the emergence of small players that will be able to produce content at an acceptable level of scale at minimal cost thanks to the AI tools available.
"Any blogger today can buy software that will write an article, create graphics and design social optimization for them. This is a huge potential, but also a problem. The quality of content will dilute and the media market will fragment into thousands of small islands," he warned.
Fragmentation, he said, will also affect readers' relationship with media. "We will lose the ability to have a common debate. The moment everyone has their personalised feed bubble, the space where we can meet and discuss will disappear, " he stressed. We already talk about bubbles today. But according to Šlerka, even an article you can link to is something that can create public debate. But even that may not be true in the so-called TikTokization of the media.
The Internet as we knew it is over.
It will be 3-7 years before we reach TikTokisification, a period that will be accompanied by an increase in the volume of content and, as a result, a certain homogenisation. The same news will be thrown at us in AI-created variations based on what we think should be reader-friendly. Wouldn't this mean the demise of the internet as we know it? According to Shlerka, this process is already well underway:
"The Internet is already over. You just might not have noticed. What we are living through is the post-internet age. What defined it in the beginning is no longer here. No interlinking, no RSS. It's all gone. You just don't see the effect as strongly yet."
The tick-tocking of media and the end of articles
Šlerka describedthe TikTokization of media as a process of moving from traditional formats such as articles or longer videos to quick and short content formats tailored to individual user preferences.
"The future of media is not articles. The future is personalised content that each user clicks through according to their preferences," he said. He likened it to TikTok, where algorithms determine what you see. "Media will look similar. Instead of articles, you get a series of tiles with tailored information. And if something catches your eye, you'll click through for a detail or to have the context explained."
You can have the context explained to you in an AI chat. According to Šlerka, chat will become a relevant media channel. "We used to go to X Chat for a bit of exciting conversation, and later we used it to arrange things like visiting with my mother-in-law. Now we'll go there for news," he approximated, adding that this will ultimately deepen reader engagement by "making it clear that there's nothing deeper than chatting." People will be able to influence the shape of the content by their interaction, which far from being in text or permanent video form. Virtual reality can bring new experiences and ways of being drawn into the story.
According to Shlerka, this development will change the very nature of journalism. "Journalists will become content curators or strategic thinkers rather than traditional copywriters. And the articles themselves, as we know them today, will become a luxury good for a narrow group of readers," he predicted.
The new role of journalists
At the end of his lecture, Josef Šlerka focused on the role of journalists in the future media ecosystem. "Journalism will become a luxury good rather than a mass affair. There will be specialized journalists who will focus on analysis, strategy and ethics. But traditional journalism as we know it today will give way to automation and mass production of content, " he said, explaining:
"Not that there won't be politics and events in the meantime. But that will largely be served by media agencies, who will supply AI models and media companies with the raw data from which news stories will be produced. If you find that far-fetched, about 75% of the daily news you consume already comes from CTK."
Still, he retained a certain amount of optimism. "While market fragmentation and the TikTokisation of content can be disruptive, they open up space for creativity and innovation. The future of media depends on how we meet these challenges, " he concluded.
The erosion of public space
Perhaps the darkest point of Šlerk's lecture was his vision of the erosion of public space. Even the homepage of Seznam itself is to some extent today. But even this form is disappearing. "Public space, where different opinions collide and debate takes place, is crucial for democracy. Once this space disappears, we will lose the ability to understand each other, " he warned, adding that this is the change he fears most.
Šlerka also stressed that the current media environment is only accelerating this erosion. "The speed at which the media produces content increases the risk of spreading misinformation. When newsrooms compete on speed, quality suffers. And the more control over what we publish is lost, the more room for error and manipulation."
As a result, journalism can become a decadent hobby for a limited group of people and leftists. The media turns into a simulacrum. The whole thing begins to resemble a short story by Jaroslav Hasek. Josef Šlerka's visions could hardly be darker.
Source: focus-age.cz
