Media
SOME technology experts have said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism is a tool not a threat to the profession.
The experts spoke to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Friday at the 2024 African Women in Media (AWiM) Conference, in Dakar, Senegal.
They said that AI only generates what is fed in it or what an individual wants it to do.
NAN reports that the theme of the two-day conference is : “Media and Sustainability”.
Ms Fola Folayan, Marketing and Partnerships Manager at Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) said that AI could transcribe an interview.
.she said that it could even go as far as doing what an editor or a copy editor would do in order to save time as every newsroom had a time frame for stories to be done.
“Personally, I see AI as a tool. It is a tool that you use. You know when they say garbage in, garbage out? It is what you put in the tool that it will generate for you.
“For instance, as a Nigerian journalist, I know that in our newsrooms we are always pressed for time. What AI can do is help you with copy editing, checking for punctuations and sentence structure,” she said.
She said that AI could also be used to transcribe, especially if the person is speaking in English.
“For now, AI has developed a point where you can translate every language. It makes work so easy. So the work you will do in two hours, you can finish it in 40 minutes.
“But for local languages like maybe Hausa or Yoruba, it is still a problem. But if you have done an interview in English, you put in the audio file into the AI, it will transcribe it back for you.
“It is something to look at and say, this can help us boost our productivity, cut our work time and in a way, it also helps with knowledge,” she said.
Dr Rose Kimani, a speaker, who talked about AI and Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), said gender violence disproportionately affected women and girls in the society.
Kimani said that the social media platforms had specific affordances in the roles they play, adding that they have some features that unintentionally foster TFGBV.
“The X platform, formerly known as twitter, has the issues of anonymity, amplification and escalation. Facebook has the tagging feature, privacy violations and impersonation.
“WhatsApp has the intimate violence mostly between opposite sex, and group harassments,” she said. .
She urged women and girls to build up professional networks, to have personal coping strategies and have diplomatic technology based responses in order to mitigate TFGBV. (NAN)
7th December, 2024.C.E
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