As media companies embrace automation and AI, the art and skill of editing as we know it is entering the phase of extinction
Aloha. This Hawaiian word for endearment also stands for welcome and goodbye. And this term is perfect to address the latest trends in the field of media, primarily print journalism. Profit-motives and bottom-line focused strategies has had a detrimental effect on the industry in the past few years. Now, with the advent of automation and artificial intelligence, the sector is set for a focus that does not look promising.
The threat to quality journalism begins with the lack of quality editors. Magazines and newspapers are increasingly seeing experience as a disqualification. Senior editors and writers are being systematically weeded out and they are being replaced by novices. The motivation is money and the arguments in support of this move are ‘people don’t read’ and ‘anybody can write’. These have become self-actualising prophesies.
We’ve been hearing the first argument for long now and the second one comes with the backing of latest apps like Grammarly, which auto-corrects sentences. Thus, turning everyone into writers, in a way. With the arrival of software such as these, many companies have begun to think it’s profitable to do away with editors. After all editors are just there to correct spellings and grammar, right? Not right.
Editors, especially experienced and talented ones, bring out the best in a story. They improve an average story, salvage the dreadful ones, temper down the ones that go overboard and draw on their knowledge about the society, culture, history, politics, technology etc to make the overall publication maintains its quality and integrity. But their greatest accomplishment is honing the skills of budding writers.
But who cares when the math sides with the software? So, now readers are forced to settle with grammatically right, but soulless and senseless pieces churned out by untrained writers, who might never reach their true potential in the absence of a seasoned editor. The overall outcome of this exercise is that people actually stop reading the stuff churned out by a bunch who have to go a long way before earning the title – writer.
Rise of the machines
And the future seems tougher. AI editors have already begun replacing human ones. For starters, curating editors, whose job is to scour the Internet and find stories for various online portals, are being fired. Apparently, companies are functioning on the logic that if it’s about finding stories based on specific keywords and topics, a bot can do it much efficiently than humans. But, it’s not as simple as 1,2,3… though. As mentioned earlier, a human editor brings something called experience to the table. And AI is still far from being human.
The company spearheading this trend is MSN (Microsoft News). The company has fired an unspecified number of direct staff, including senior editors, after they had terminated dozens of contractual employees, according to a GeekWire report. Since the site is focused on collating news than doing original content, the shift looked sensible to the owners. But the shift has not been smooth and efficient as MSN had expected as the AI editor made a ‘boo-boo’. The mistake belies a deeper issue and seriously questions the literal dehumanisation of the editorial desk.
In a story on racial issues faced by a mixed-race pop star in the band Little Mix, the AI failed to identify the person correctly. The story was about band member Jade Thirlwall, but the story had the photo of her band-mate Leigh-Anne Pinnock. That’s because logically AI cannot ‘see’ colour and racial features, it can only calculate based on the code.
Yes, I agree that human editors have made bigger mistakes. But the difference is that they can also understand the mistake or another person who knows the band members can point out the same and action would be taken to rectify the mistake. But AI editors don’t have such a peer review method in place. And even if it had a peer AI editor, would it understand the mistake in the first place? Not likely, because the AI editor functions purely on the algorithm that it was built on. And as far it is concerned, there was no error.
But, sadly, this trend of automation is here to stay and expand. And with AI editors, can AI writers be far behind? Not at all. Which means there will come a time when every news report, analysis and feature story would read like the same. That’s because AI writers and AI editors can only reproduce the styles and structures of yore. With an optimised method in place, people will be fed with goop that will have the facts but will be shorn of flavour, character and in short, life.
Even though this is the reality that’s already happening, where companies say aloha (goodbye) to humans and aloha (welcome) to AI, writers and editors will still retain relevance as long as humanity maintains its yearning for variety, substance, flavour and life in their reading material.
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