Afraid of Artificial Intelligence

Journalists should be afraid of the introduction of artificial intelligence, because a journalist’s duty is to strive for truthful and critical reporting. Journalistic decision-making power must not be given outside the editorial office – not even to artificial intelligence. But the image created with artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be top-of-the-line, it’s allowed to include things that a human wouldn’t put in the image. This is good to note in relation to our experiment. It’s okay if, for example, the character in the picture grows a third arm from the top of his head. Our purpose is that the use of artificial intelligence illustration is as transparent as possible.

Or as transparent as it usually can be.

One problem can be intellectual property rights. In training artificial intelligence, already existing images have been used, but of course human graphic artists are also influenced by their environment – and above all specially trained ones – knowingly or unknowingly.

In the future, perhaps the legislation will outline the issue in some way, but i find it difficult to see a big difference in whether art history and different stylistic trends are used to train humans or artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can, on request, imitate, among other things, the unique style of different artists, which at least has its own moral problems. Whether that should also be prohibited is of course a separate matter, but at least in the journalistic media this should be avoided.

It could be that in the future, pictures made with the help of artificial intelligence will be removed from old articles, a humble apology will be made and that’s it. At this stage of development, it is not even worth considering what kind of intellectual property rights we journalists might have as the author of the prompt. Our experiment is completely disposable – you can borrow if you want and dare.

Artificial intelligence has also always been associated with the fear of losing jobs, and journalism is not a zone free from this pain. In my opinion, it is clear that certainly in the near future, fast news work based on, for example, bulletins will be handled almost entirely by artificial intelligence, and a journalist will be needed at most to moderate the outputs of artificial intelligence. It will inevitably also reduce the number of journalists needed for this job and maybe detach them for other tasks – until artificial intelligence replaces them too.

And that’s what artificial intelligence should aim for on a larger scale: that humanity could do more with less effort. Call me a sci-fi romantic, but in the long run technology should make it possible for there to be no more work – just hobbies.