Programme

NEWEST TECHNOLOGIES VS. TRADITIONAL JOURNALISM. IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A THREAT TO THE JOURNALISTIC PROFESSION?

Sustaining Economic Expansion
Congress Centre, Conference Hall B1

The new era of technical innovation is resulting in fundamental changes to many traditional business procedures, jobs and professions – and journalism is no exception. Computer software is offering cutting-edge online solutions that increasingly surpass humans in terms of speed and quality of produced content. Automatic scripts for writing news products based on processing raw data are being widely used by dozens of news organizations around the world and these news writing robots do not need holidays or weekends, never miss deadlines and generate content ready at a fraction of the cost. How far away are we from the day when machines acquire the ability to perform journalistic investigations and write analytical memos? Are we on the doorstep of a new era when human beings will no longer be necessary to do a journalist’s job?

Moderators
Mikhail Gusman , Chairman, Russian National Committee of UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication; Vice-President, News Agency World Council (NACO)
Clive Marshall , Chief Executive Officer, Press Association Group

Panellists
John Daniszewski , Vice President, Associated Press
Malcolm Kirk , President, The Canadian Press
Siyang Liu , Vice President, Xinhua
Sergey Mikhailov , Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of the Investments and Strategic Planning Committee, Cherkizovo Group
Hiroki Sugita , Executive Director, Kyodo News
Giuseppe Cerbone , Chief Executive Officer, ANSA

Broadcast

Key moments

Those who want to stay in journalism in the years to come need to look for areas where it will take quite some time for artificial intelligence to be introduced and where human beings will still call the shots.
Sergey Mikhaylov
I am sure that artificial intelligence is going to determine our development, change traditional journalism and change the economic model of journalism.
Siyang Liu
There are three common characteristics in the jobs that robots or artificial intelligence cannot take over: those jobs cannot be preprogrammed, they need creativeness and they need high communication skills. Journalism is one of such jobs.
Hiroki Sugita