AI has continued to grow exponentially and literally recast media narratives in audacious ways that change how stories are scripted, reconstructed and experienced. AI is steadily becoming a ubiquitous force that is sometimes quite hard to discern whether the content created by it is genuine or not. It can thus be said that as more and more algorithms select and summarize headlines, the feeling of journalism is gradually being replaced by the notion of faster and more effective algorithms.
This change in ownership distorts the perceptions of the news that people have especially because it only conditions them to think in certain ways. AI has a tendency to feed users with content that the former believes the latter would like to read, confining the reader to their bubbles. Successful advertising and engagement strategies are created at the cost of general truth and fairness and objectivity; all because personalization hence leads to sensationalism in an attempt to make a sale.
The problem of people losing confidence in the news sources deepens as readers doubt the truthfulness of information produced with the help of artificial intelligence tools. With deep fakes, synthetic voices and auto-boom, people cannot easily differentiate between real journalism and fake ones. This obviously creates doubt and disengagement with the conventional media outlets or rather news sources.
Moreover, the transparency issue deepens since media companies rely on AI a lot when the use of the technology is not revealed to the public. Poor consumers remain ignorant of how many portions of what they are so enthusiastically consuming are generated by an algorithm, which reduces the trustworthiness of news sources. If trust is broken, that means people cannot be informed accurately and also cannot be able to check and balance their leaders.
In order to regain the people’s trust, media relations must reaffirm the priority of good old human-driven journalism coupled with the use of AI in moderation. Reporting can be made better by the help of AI but it does not mean that editorial decisions or ethical factors should be removed. Through technology, journalists need to guide the process of informing the public by embracing technology as an enabler and not a replacement for accurate dissemination of information.
Conclusion
In conclusion, AI-enhanced automation is gradually altering the media landscape; however, it should not mean sacrificing the principles of honesty and credibility. Journalism was given guidelines to embrace, which include; such as responding to instances of wrong doing, aligning their practices to journalistic principles, and avoiding automation dependency among other requirements. It is necessary to rise to the challenge of contemporary communications and strive to be credible, having humans, not machines, as the main asset of the media.
