Artificial intelligence is a good servant but a bad master in the media, representatives of domestic media houses agreed at the Czech Internet Forum conference.
Domestic media companies use artificial intelligence (AI) for auxiliary processes, but they rule out the full replacement of human work with generative AI tools. They see compliance with internal rules set for working with AI as crucial and see its use primarily in saving time. At the same time, they say that investment is needed in people who create quality and trustworthy content. At Tuesday's Czech Internet Forum 2024 (CIF) conference by Internet Info, executives from the largest media houses agreed.
"We will definitely not go the way of the Polish radio OFF Krakow," Czech Radio CEO René Zavoral said in a discussion, referring to a recent experiment by a Polish radio station that entrusted its broadcasts to AI-created presenters. After a week, however, the AI-created broadcaster stopped broadcasting because the experiment had aroused considerable controversy. "The human factor is a priority, we want a human to always be behind the broadcast," the head of the public radio station said. Czech Radio has set internal rules on how to use AI and sees ethical issues as a priority, René Zavoral added.
TV Nova CEO Daniel Grunt said it was necessary to go against the tide and invest in people to attract the best creators to the station. "We need to invest in the best quality people who create the best quality content," he said. What will determine success, he said, is that Nova is able to create "content for everyone, not content for everyone". But he doesn't think there needs to be some kind of certification that guarantees across the market that people are creating the content for a given medium. "The obligation to label what AI has been used for is sufficient. I don't think people would watch Nova more if it was certified," he added.
Lenka Černá, CEO of Economia, on the other hand, thinks certification would be good and that the Czech media market is getting closer to it. "Big platforms have a problem distinguishing the credibility of content, for us it is an opportunity to show credibility," she said. She sees AI as an opportunity to simplify and innovate some activities through it, but at the same time not to deviate from the principles of professional journalism. Overall, she sees AI as an opportunity for media outlets to offer readers a better experience compared to artificially created content.
Like his colleagues, Lubor Zoufal, director of digital at Czech News Center, calls AI a good helper. CNC uses AI, for example, for spell checking or transforming content from one form to another, i.e. radio content to online video. "AI allows us to do such transformations very quickly," he described. AI can also help streamline the operations of media houses. But he also sees the human factor as key and as an element that can strengthen the credibility of the medium. "AI breaks credibility against content published on the internet. But for traditional media, it is an opportunity and something that will start to come back because news is made by humans," he added.
Even recent research by Nielsen and Admosphere Times has shown that the issue of credibility and the use of AI is key in the eyes of users. Indeed, the data showed that half (51%) of users do not trust news content that uses AI. The data was presented at the CIF conference by Tereza Šimečková and Tomáš Hynčica. Only a tenth of Czech users agree with the use of AI in news content across media types. The highest level of agreement (15%) is for news websites and 12% agree with the use of AI in podcasts.
Source: mediaguru.cz
