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Navigating the ethical landscape of generative AI and journalism

July 6, 2023 DCN

At the 2023 Collision Conference, held June 26-30 in Toronto Canada, DCN’s editorial director Michelle Manafy sat down with three media executives to discuss the ethics of using generative AI in journalism. The conversation covered the evolution of AI and its usage in the media, up to today’s much-discussed generative AI tools. Panelists weighed in on a range of use cases and where they would – or would not – permit (or even encourage) the use of generative AI in their media organizations. They also discussed whether or not generative AI is an existential threat to journalism, journalists — and even humanity as a whole. Listen to the discussion here and/or read a few highlights below.

Navigating the ethical landscape of generative AI and journalism

Featuring:

Gideon Lichfield – Global Editorial Director, Wired
Harry McCracken – Global Technology Editor, Fast Company
Traci Mabrey – Head of News, Factiva
Michelle Manafy – Editorial Director, Digital Content Next

A few highlights from the panel discussion:

Traci Mabrey: We’ve been using [machine learning and AI] forever and that’s a really important component as we look at this. This new horizon is going to be something, and I don’t think any of us know exactly what that is yet. But we have been using the building blocks of it for quite some time…

Gideon Lichfield: I think what’s changed is that it now has the capability to produce something that looks like something humans would create from scratch. And I emphasize looks like because it’s very clear that what’s going on is imitation… the fact that it became available as an easy to use interface was really crucial… this technology was around already for a few years, but it wasn’t that easy to access. The big change last year was just that it became easy to access…

Michelle Manafy: We’ve heard of late that some big tech leaders, some really smart folks call generative AI an existential threat. Are we afraid? Should we be afraid? And I don’t just mean as the media. You guys all think about larger issues in society. Is this good? Is it bad? Should we all be scared?

Harry McCracken: I think the worrying about it blowing up the world or killing us all is a little overwrought, particularly because there’s a pretty long list of genuine concerns that are either an issue right now or pretty clearly will be over the next few years involving things like misinformation. There are huge privacy concerns with a handful of large companies grabbing all our data and synthesizing that for their own benefit. I’d say there are plenty of things to worry about with A.I… but destroying the world might be more like the way that social media has, in a lot of ways, degraded the human experience…

Gideon Lichfield: …the increasing volume of just sheer garbage that is out there that is going to be generated by AI: that’s a that’s a real worry. And the job displacement part is also a thing that I worry about. But I think there is a way to use it. There is a way to use A.I. that empowers people, gives them extra tools. But it’s also a great temptation for companies, for employers to simply look at it as a way to save costs…

Harry McCracken: …Journalism is unusual in that the writing is the product. Most of the writing that exists in the world is not the product, just the byproduct. There are a lot of cases where having a computer draft your internal memo or whatever makes a lot of sense and will fill you up to do more important things…

Traci Mabrey: …I think if we look at our journalists and our editors around the world, there’s a very personal scope that goes into everything somebody is writing and somebody is speaking about. And I think that’s a really big component when you look at it. The technology, as Gideon was saying, it is bringing up a set of words. It’s able to make 500 words on X topic regarding this. But that is not the way that I would infuse that information into the world. And it’s not those types of things that make organic journalism and all of the real nuggets that we get from it… I think for the drafting process and the information gathering, certainly saving a lot of time. But we’re certainly on the path of that being a still a very personal end product.

Learn more about how media leaders are developing their policies around the usage of AI and generative AI in their organizations:

Media organizations grapple with developing AI policies

Industry-Research

Building an ethical framework for decentralized social technologies

March 28, 2023 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

To date, only a few publications have offered an ethical framework for decentralized social technologies (DSTs) ‒ blockchain, Web3, and Fediverse. The collapse of FTX, a cryptocurrency futures exchange using blockchain methodology, alarmed many. Its absence of records, accounting controls, and transparent decision-making processes highlights the need for new governance guidelines across new technologies.

As a result, the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative, a collaboration between Brown University School of Public Health and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has offered up a foundation for ethical and social experimentation with DSTs. Their new report, Ethics Of Decentralized Social Technologies, unpacks the transformation of DSTs, their impact, built-in mechanics, and downstream consequences. Importantly, it offers lessons learned and insights into how decentralized social technologies can be developed and implemented ethically and responsibly.

Ethical framework

The Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative examines AI ethics and bioethics frameworks to identify DTS best practices. Employing AI ethics includes asking fundamental questions like how to use the data to generate predictions and how institutions will use the predictions. AI ethics also includes basic questions about who makes these decisions, sets the timeline, and establishes the criteria.

In addition, bioethics looks to find the middle ground between identifying risks and modifying them while continuing the work unless deemed unsafe. Importantly, bioethics technologists structure their practice in four stages. A safety net is also essential to the process, with each layer providing safety guarantees to support safe experimentation.

Be precise about goals and offering validations;
Have governance structures to oversee the design and evaluation of experiments;
Publicly report what happens, what works, what doesn’t, and any unintended results; and
Have precise mechanisms for democratic oversight developed in collaboration with public democratic organizations.

Constitutional moments

The report also examines whether the DST ecosystem exemplifies a constitutional moment ‒ a pivotal point of transformation. The U.S. Constitution, written in the late eighteen century, reflects the U.S. economic, demographic, technological, and social structure of its time. However, new technologies (i.e., Industrial Revolution, air travel, and the biomedical revolution) emerge and cause transformation in the structure of society.

Constitutional moments do not mean we need to write a new Constitution but a framework to navigate and experiment with new technologies and social platforms. While blockchain technology is often celebrated for decentralized networks (because they are less likely to marginalize one community over another), they can also create divisions. These divisions can include social bias in their datasets. And training on them will replicate and intensify these patterns. Therefore, we must carefully examine the ethical practice of new technology to ensure that decentralized technologies also bridge communities and build a connected society.

The Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative acknowledges that this is just the start of the ethical DTS landscape. The report highlights the importance of ensuring user privacy and data protection and the need for transparency and accountability in developing decentralized social technologies. It also emphasizes the importance of fostering a diverse and inclusive community and ensuring that decentralized systems are accessible to all and beneficial to society.

Perspectives

How we’re fighting back against shady marketers

August 8, 2016 DCN

In 2014, Inc.com created an “open contributor” network, in which a few hundred outside columnists (some paid, some unpaid) post their columns directly to our site. For the most part, this system has served us and our readers very well.

There are nonetheless some risks in the process. One I didn’t anticipate is that a crop of unscrupulous marketers has emerged who will pay our outside contributors several hundred dollars or more to mention and link to their clients.

On the one hand, paying for coverage is nothing new. A New York media veteran recently reminded me that in the 1970s and 1980s, public relations companies would show up in newsrooms or at press events and hand out $20 bills in return for write-ups of their clients. On the other hand, giving external contributors access to a media publishing platform can take the already-dubious PR practice to disturbing new levels. Indeed, the bolder outfits apparently use their access to publishing platforms to recruit clients, basically promising that they can get them mentioned on our site, Huffington Post, Forbes.com and others.

The pay-for-placement practice is a blatant violation of the code of ethics that we give our contributors when they come on board. It is also to my mind a clear violation of the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides. Specifically, the FTC says that its deceptive advertising law applies “if an advertiser – or someone working for an advertiser – pays you or gives you something of value to mention a product.”

Technically, I suppose, someone paying an Inc.com contributor $500 to mention XYZ Widget Corporation is not an advertiser. The principle, however, is the same: A reader ought to be confident that any product or service he or she is reading about on Inc.com is completely independent of the publication and the contributor.

When I learned about these marketing pitches a few weeks ago, I filed a formal complaint with the FTC, providing the name and e-mail address of a marketer who’d approached some of our contributors. Given the shady nature of this practice, and the difficulty of proving that money has changed hands, I am not sure if the agency can really do much to stop it.

So we’ve done our best to take the matter into our own hands. We have strengthened our code of ethics, and asked each contributor to sign it; any contributor who won’t loses the privileges to publish on our site. I am confident that the overwhelming majority of our contributors will sign this without hesitation. We’ve also implemented other checking systems to help us weed out suspect columns.

New publishing technologies and new business models can bring many benefits, but they can also require new forms of vigilance. At Inc.com, we’re committed to taking the task on; the relationship we have with our readers and our legitimate advertisers is too important to risk.

Before joining Inc., James Ledbetter (@jledbetter) was the Opinion Editor of Reuters. He was the founding editor of Slate’s financial site The Big Money, deputy managing editor of CNN Money, and has published five books.

Perspectives | Revenue

Why journalistic ethics don’t have to conflict with business success

July 28, 2016 DCN

I was speaking at a conference a few weeks ago about Spirited Media, the local news startup I currently run. After giving some background on our overall strategy, I took a few questions about our business model, which is primarily focused on events and not advertising. The questions were good ones, all coming from people who clearly understood that, without new revenue models, the survival of independent journalism is no sure thing.

It was quite encouraging to get so many questions about revenue. In fact, it felt too good to be true. And, of course, it was. Soon, the inevitable happened. One of the journalists in the room asked, essentially, “Why are you talking so much about business stuff? I remember meeting you a few years ago, and you were so high-minded about journalism. When exactly did you sell out?” Now, those were not his exact words, but I’m pretty sure those in attendance would agree that was the gist of the question/statement.

Welcome to journalism, the only industry where a significant amount of its smartest employees not only take pride in the fact they don’t care how the companies they work for make money, but chastise those who do.

As I noted earlier, most of the other attendees at this session were interested in the business side, which is encouraging. But there are still way too many journalists who throw their hands up at the first discussion of money, muttering, “This isn’t my problem. I just do the journalism.” Personally, I think that’s an ignorant point of view, one at the root of many of the cultural problems inside legacy news organizations.

No, I’m not suggesting blurring the church-state line between the editorial and the business side. I am as true a believer in the ethical foundation that says a news organization’s business concerns cannot impact its editorial output. But I believe too many journalists use that ethical bright line as an excuse not to engage in any conversation about the state of their company’s business. And that is where I believe the damage is done.

What’s even more maddening is that many of these same journalists are more than happy to pop off on social media or comment threads about the stupidity of their company’s business executives after a layoff or any negative business news.

So, no, journalists should not allow their ethics to be impacted by larger business considerations. But, in my opinion, you could steer an aircraft carrier through the gap between merely understanding how your business operates, and committing journalistic sins.

Here are a few of my core beliefs in how journalists should interact with the business side:

1. Talking to people who make the money for your company is not a problem. In fact, it should be encouraged.

When I became executive editor of washingtonpost.com in 2004, no one in sales was even allowed to use the conference room located on the editorial floor without direct permission from the editor, even though that conference room was located off the lobby and did not require any contact with the newsroom. I killed that rule on my first day.

I had returned to The Post after four years at AOL, and one of the best lessons I had learned there was how valuable it was to talk to the people who spent their time trying to make money for your company. In my first week at AOL, I was told I should go to lunch with the guy who led business development and sales for the sports channel I managed. My first thought was, “Am I allowed do to that?” But I did it, and came back a changed man. I learned a ton about what he was hearing when he went out to sell, what advertisers wanted to buy and what they wish existed that they could buy. I learned about the broader AOL business model. I learned that the people trying to bring in revenue were just as committed to their mission as we were to ours.

Of course, I’ve been making this point for years, and the response is usually: “But, Jim, going to lunch like that could put me in a compromising position.” Look, if the journalism ethics that have been instilled in us in college and throughout our professional careers cannot withstand dining with someone from sales, the problem may be the stability of those ethics, not the lunch.

2. Take time to learn how the company you work for makes money. Read quarterly earnings reports and SEC filings if you’re a publicly traded company, and ask questions of senior business leaders whenever you get the chance.

This is a recommendation that may only apply to journalism, since most employees in most other industries likely do this routinely. To me, there’s no excuse for not understanding your company’s basic business model. As I was leaving one of my previous jobs, I went to lunch with a relatively senior editor. Over lunch, it became clear that he didn’t really understand the breakdown of advertising and circulation revenue. He thought the split was closer to 50-50, when, of course, it was more like 85-15 in favor of advertising. I was just stunned that someone so senior could be so clueless about the company’s basic business. Hell, there’s a reason you can put a buck in a newspaper box and take all of them, right? And understanding the breakdown of different lines of revenue seems to me to be the least of what journalists ought to understand.

3. Be part of the solution. Use your brain to help come up with ideas for making money. Those ideas don’t need to have anything to do with your day-to-day job. Most journalists are pretty smart people; there’s no reason for you not to help.

At Billy Penn, the Philadelphia-based site that Spirited Media operates, we all sit around a table together: journalists, sales people, developers, event planners, etc. There is no physical separation, and, more importantly, no psychological one. We toss around ideas for stories, events, advertisers to pursue and new site features. No one is prohibited from weighing in on any topic. We all traffic in the same Slack channels. And nothing we’ve done has ever threatened the standard church-state line.

In fact, quite the opposite has happened. One example: When we were putting together a story last fall about Philadelphia-area microbreweries creating special Pope-themed beers for Pope Francis’s impending visit to the city, someone in the newsroom mentioned how cool it would be to get all those brewers in one place for a tasting. A few weeks later, we held a Pope-themed beer tasting event at a South Philly bar called POPE. No ethical boundaries were obliterated. No journalists were injured in the making of that event. And we made some money. Working with the business side is not that complicated, and not nearly as ominous as many journalists make it out to be.

As for the self-righteous questioner I faced a few weeks ago – who, by the way, is an educator – I hope that he’s not passing on the bad business-related habits of a previous generation of journalists. Instead of teaching students that anyone who cares about the business side should wear a scarlet letter, maybe he can help them understand the different business models that now exist in journalism.

Without a doubt, everyone in media must understand that how companies make money is important regardless of their job title. Current and future generations of journalists need to be part of solving the massive economic problem facing journalism, all while continuing to maintain the ethical boundaries that journalism has – and always should – defend. Because if being worried about how we make money is considered “selling out,” then I’m proud to be a sellout.

Jim Brady is the founder and CEO of Spirited Media, which operates the Philadelphia-based mobile news platform Billy Penn. He is also currently serving as the public editor for ESPN. Before launching Billy Penn, Jim’s also served as Executive Editor of washingtonpost.com, Editor in Chief of Digital First Media, General Manager ofTBD.com and Programming Director of News & Sports for America Online. He is a Past President of the Online News Association, and has also served on the boards of the American Society for News Editors and National Press Foundation.