AI shouldn’t distract journalism into a new trap

The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here.The authors write, and I agree, that journalism has spent 25 years on a “hamster wheel” of technologies — web, then social media, then mobile — each of which has only forced journalists to produce more and produce it faster. Today, the advent of generative AI promises to do that on steroids, but the authors argue that, by virtue of targeting knowledge work itself rather than just the logistics of production, it also presents journalism with a “constitutive moment”, an opportunity of sorts for journalism to reflect on its real purpose. That is to say, journalism can use the “hamster wheel” to run even faster or, to extend the metaphor, it can reimagine what ‘running’ even means.Meanwhile, AI is also reshaping political life by increasing access to personalised information, expanding the ability to produce disinformation at scale,…