The bigger question, one that doesn’t get as much ink, isn’t about what happens to those of us who create the content. It’s about how AI will change the needs and habits of the people we serve — our readers, viewers, listeners — and about how the news industry can adapt to those changes.
That’s not a sometime-in-the-future issue. Search traffic is already down, as users increasingly depend on AI-generated summaries in Google and other search engines to get the information they need rather than plow through links and multiple stories on the same event.
But that’s just a tiny taste of what’s coming. Generative AI promises to revolutionize how people interact with information — how they’ll come to it, what they’ll expect from it, and what they’d do with it. In the process, it’ll upend what we think of as a “story” — not just the words we put on paper but the idea of what might be worthy of coverage.
It’ll force us to rethink what we create and who we create it for.
The questions are multiple: If readers increasingly come to expect that stories will be created on the fly for them, and personalized to what AI knows of their level of knowledge and interest, what happens to the carefully crafted narratives that journalists pour hours (and days and weeks, sometimes) into writing?
Read more | SEMAFOR