By Ngozi Comfort Omojunikanbi Ph.D, Toluwanimi Grace Omojunikanbi, Clinton Chukwuebuka Mmezi
The world is experiencing rapid changes in technology. There is a rapid experience of changes in science, technology and innovation (STI) globally especially with the innovation of AI, robotics, renewal energy, biotechnology, synthetic biology, drones, 3D printing and proteomics etc. all innovations driving the current information society. The manifestations of extreme dysfunctions of the extant global information eco-system have been described as the ‘infocalypse’.
Artificial intelligence which has been described as a system’s ability to interpret external data correctly, to learn from such data, and to use those learning to achieve specific tasks and goals through flexile adaptation, is one of the emerging instrument of the present knowledge bank. AI involves using machines to do what human beings do. It affects all aspects of life, economy, sports, business, politics, and agriculture among others. It is driven by the conjunction of computer and technology to intensify human achievement. AI has the capacity to learn over time. According to UNESCO (2019), AI thrives on data. An AI system must be capable of doing three things; store knowledge, apply the stored knowledge to solve problems, and acquire new knowledge through experience. Meanwhile, the different dimensions of AI include thinking humanly, thinking rationally, acting humanly, acting rationally. The ideal characteristics of Artificial Intelligence are its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal.
However, studies have shown that rapid advances can have serious drawbacks if they surpass the ability of societies to adapt with the issue of AI, there is perceived fears of AI taking over jobs. There are fears that jobs are disappearing as many and more economic activity is automated. There is also the perceived fear that STI will widen inequalities or create new ones. Most of these fears have been raised in developing countries of which Nigeria is one.
Furthermore, Africa generally and Nigeria in particular, seems to be characterized by poor STI infrastructure, a small pool of researchers, little effort in science and technology programmes, weak intellectual property framework and low scientific outcome. UNESCO (2015) report reveals that Africa remains disadvantaged in overall STI report, attributing it to low investments in STI capacity developments. The report shows that out of about 5% of global gross domestic product, only 1.3% of global spending is on research and development. On several occasions, STI – a major factor for sustainable economic development is not being prioritized within Nigeria’s national agenda. The negligence of STI could be attributed to many years of political uncertainty, policy inconsistencies and lack of will power of the policy making authorities. Also, proper communication of STI research outputs seems relegated in the discourse on evidence-based policy making especially in Nigeria. There is also lack of proper utilization, awareness and public understanding and perception of STI with regards to AI which have a strong correlation with the development of a country. With the ranking of Nigeria to 66th position out of 73 countries, in an innovation capacity ranking (STI report 2021).
There is perceived skepticism and reluctance among journalists to utilize AI in their work due to concerns about its accuracy and potential job displacement. The emergence of AI is perceived to greatly influence the news industry in gathering and dissemination of news. The adoption of AI in news gathering and dissemination is perceived to pose a great threat and challenge to journalists.
AI for News gathering, dissemination and production
The overall windfall of artificial intelligence is to promote an effortless way of living by trying to mimic human decisions and actions without natural human shortcomings, such as fatigue, emotion, and limited time. Today AI covers a variety of technologies and tools, some are time-tested, and other are relatively new. Suggested searches, cyber fraud detection, virtual assistance, facial recognition, self driving cars, and smart home devices are some applications of AI that are
massively changing how people live and work.
The vision of Artificial intelligence for Journalism, the media and journalism industry, without exception, is being transformed by AI. An understanding of these technologies could help the journalists to hold firmly and apply these technologies more effectively. Though, there are concerns about fake news, misinformation, acceptability, disinformation, loss of jobs, ethical considerations, etc. it is believed that AI could completely transform the newsroom and the work of journalists by demanding new skills among journalists and the need for a new and easier work flows. This has led to several questions and has caused the journalist and researchers to raise questions such as which newsroom roles might AI replace? Where the press has not utilized AI?, Will AI eventually become a part of every news story?. Will AI replace humans? All these and many more are questions battling in the minds of journalists and media practitioners in general.
As the internet develops from a social network to an intelligent network, it has been a network of information and people and an intelligent network of everything connected with information, people, products, and services in the future.
In the background of AI and intelligent network, technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, algorithm recommendation, machine news, news game, big data, and other cutting-edge technologies come together to impact the journalism and media industry. A more sophisticated understanding of these technologies could help the journalists to grasp and apply these technologies more effectively. Based on this, AI technology is seen as an ecological environment for the next generation of journalists. AI technology will not only change each link in the value chain of the media industry, but also reshape the whole process of news gathering, dissemination and production.
Artificial Intelligence technology has a wide range of application fields and imagination space in the process of combining with journalism and media. It has also raised concerns about fake news, misinformation, disinformation, ethical challenges, fear of loss of jobs, algorithm biases, and privacy security. These questions require us to re-examine the values and responsibilities of journalism and journalists in an ethical sense and find a reasonable framework for the application of AI journalism. A recent report revealed that a major obstacle for the development of AI in news media is the Publication of talent competition. This competition not only involves attracting talent but also retaining professionals in newsrooms, which offer lower salaries in comparison to the tech industry. This newsroom brain drain works against the adoption of technologies in the news industry. Even under the above conditions, news outlets around the world are embracing AI solutions in their newsrooms. In recent years, newsrooms began to increasingly automate news stories, although machine learning algorithms are used to a certain extent for some of these projects, many projects still rely on simple automation that fills in the blanks of template stories and does not produce stories built on prior data.
Although many of these journalistic bots do not use machine learning or NLP models, they rely on a series of steps to take (planning) and understand when to carry out a certain step (scheduling) in order to publish messages. Some researchers have identified four different categories of news bots: “the inputs and sources of input data; the outputs produced by the news bots; the algorithms that guide how a news bot turns inputs into outputs; and the function or intent of the news bot. In Brazil, newsrooms mainly rely on Twitter bots that use AI models, particularly NLP, machine learning and planning, scheduling, and optimization to process large volumes of data and interact on digital media platforms. However, bots have also been used with malicious intent in several recent events, such as the 2016 U.S. elections and the Brexit campaign. Many people expect AI technology to reduce the costs of investigative journalism, However, AI models are generally built for a particular story, which means that these algorithms must be created and trained again for novel projects. As a result, high initial investments cannot be done on installment over multiple products. Similarly, investigative news projects that rely on computer vision require significant investments to build technological infrastructure and hire highly qualified personnel to develop such codes. Furthermore, AI models are usually trained using old and biased datasets, which can generate many ethical complications.
However, there is a number of increasing awareness and initiatives by professional organizations to promote best practices, address ethical questions and develop ethical guidelines for AI systems. Since, AI is becoming increasingly a major tool for shaping information in the digital age, if deployed wisely, can benefit the society enormously in positive ways including addressing the issue of fake news, misinformation and disinformation challenges. The diffusion of this innovative AI can help Nigeria overcome this challenge.
Nigeria and independent researchers can partner with EU in this Project on AI as the EU has different project in this field. The response to disinformation by European policy recognize the role of independent scientific research. It is believed that the fight against disinformation is the responsibility of every stakeholder including Fact checkers and Researchers. With the PROMPT project which funded by the European Commission, PROMPT intends to offer journalists and activists new tools to recognize, anticipate and tackle disinformation narratives. PROMPT will work with media experts/professionals and journalists such as Erich-Brost Institute (Germany), Les Surligeurs (France), Re:Baltica (Baltic states), Digital Bridge (Romania). With such project in place, it would be possible to leverage on AI to stem the tide of fake news and disinformation which is one of the challenges / fear of the usage of AI tools by journalists in Nigeria. It is also perceived that AI would assist in data veracity and identification of fake news. People on social media platforms, merely like and share information without most times verifying the authenticity of such information, which is a big challenge. Due to this concern, there is therefore the need to improve media literacy. AI powered tools to spot anomalies, such as fake news promptly places it at an advantaged position to be adopted.
Data analysis and presentation
Table 1: Perception of Journalists on the use of AI tools
Findings in Table 1 reveal that majority of the participants perceive the use of AI tools to be reliable. 54.8% of the participants have positive perception on the use of AI tools, while 20.5% has negative perception on the use of AI tools. The implication of this data is that many perceived the use of AI tools as a credible source of information gathering and dissemination.
Discussion of findings
This study investigated the perception and utilization of Artificial Intelligence for News gathering and dissemination by Journalists in Nigeria. Findings revealed that the level of awareness of emerging AI tools among journalists were low. This could also be the reason the usage of AI tools was low. This findings tally with the finding of Jammy Seigha Guanah (2021) who found that the awareness level of the respondents about AI was low; that the media are not doing enough in enlightening the people about the operations of AI, and that majority of the respondents are ignorant of the effects of AI on them, their jobs, and the society they live in.
Semiu, B., Abdullah, S., & Perpetua, C. U. (2023) also carried out a survey of awareness and adoption of artificial intelligence journalism among Lagos and Kwara States journalists, and found out that with a survey of 376 journalists in Lagos and Kwara states, there was a high awareness of artificial intelligence journalism among Lagos and Kwara States journalists in Nigeria. However, only a few have adopted the innovation in their day to day practice. This is because of the perceived ethical and professional challenges that undermine journalist’s ingenuity, creativity and skillfulness.
On their Perception of the use of AI tools, their perception varied, majority of the respondents which gave (54.8%) percent had positive perception on the use of AI tools. The research also found that the respondents have variation of preferences on artificial intelligence used with majority making use of Chat GPT (49.3%), followed by Grammarly (31.5%), Metal AI (27.4%) and the least been Dall-E with 3.4%. findings also revealed that the challenges and fears associated with acceptance of AI in news gathering and dissemination by journalists in Rivers state are basically economic factors such as fear of mass unemployment, fear that only experts can operate artificial intelligence, fear of ethics of journalism misappropriation and penalties, and believability, acceptability and authenticity such as fear of bias by AI creator and fear of feeding AI with the wrong data which will in turn bring out a wrong output. There is no denying the fact the merging nexus between digital information and strategic misinformation, disinformation and fake news has eon employed varyingly to undermine democracies, embarrass political opponents or justify wars or tribal sentiments. It is believed that AI advances in technology has enhanced its performance. It is therefore vital to integrate it into the present day human efforts in fighting disinformation and misinformation which has plagued the contemporary information space.
Conclusion
The target of AI technology is to provide systems that would enable human-like interactions with software and provide decision-support for specific tasks. Artificial intelligence for news gathering and dissemination has become an important way of news production in both developed and developing nations of the world. This is believed to have changed the dynamics of journalism not just in Rivers State, Nigeria but globally. Meanwhile, journalists in Rivers state level of awareness varies, likewise in its usage. Even though, some of them acknowledged the efficiency of AI use and its assistance in the execution of their duties, many feared its usage because of the fear or perception that it could create mass unemployment by displacing many of them from their media organizations, fear of fake news, disinformation and ethical considerations. Disinformation needs to be identified as a multifaceted problem, one that requires multiple approaches to resolve. Governments, regulators, think tanks, the internet and technology providers need to join force like EU is doing to better shape the next internet with as less disinformation as possible, including online disinformation.
AI could completely transform the newsroom and the work of journalists by demanding new skills among journalists and the need for a new and good work flows. However, artificial intelligence for news gathering and dissemination is something to welcome because the world is fast moving into the Age of Artificial Intelligence and any profession or country that fails to follow the trend could be left out and possibly become analogue, obsolete and outdated. Areas of study where AI systems of detection need to improve are in how to treat satire, opinion pieces, and cloaking.
Recommendations
- Media practitioners should make use of AI tools to complement the efforts of humans in news gathering and dissemination.
- A robust training, re-training, campaign and fund should be made available by stakeholders to educate, train and create massive awareness on the importance and adoption of AI tools for media practitioners and the general public at large, especially in developing nations.
- The study of AI should be included in the academic curriculum of journalism students to enhance early adaptation and adoption of AI tools in the profession.
This article was originally published by The European Journalism Observatory on 12 March 2025