"This report describes the Applied AI in Journalism Challenge (AIJC)—a competitive accelerator program intended to prototype pragmatic applications of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in mission-driven newsrooms around the world. The program was launched in June 2023 and ran until Novembe ... r 2023. Funding was provided by the Open Society Foundations. The author of this report was the lead consultant for the project. The AIJC program was the first of its kind and therefore was itself a prototype—both of a process for accelerating the pragmatic adoption of AI within newsrooms, and also of an approach to developing investment opportunities around applying AI to news. The program was largely successful, developing a cohort of capable and motivated teams and actively engaging with them as they developed substantial new capabilities. The program also succeeded in producing a range of practical insights for its different stakeholder groups—newsrooms, program operators, investors, and the news industry generally. This report provides a complete record of the AIJC program. The primary intention in writing it is to contribute the experience and insights accumulated during the program to the global journalism community, and to provide sufficient detail and specificity to be directly useful to anyone seeking to apply those lessons to hands-on projects, accelerator programs, and investments. The first section of the report provides a systematic description of the program, including why it was initiated, what it was trying to achieve, how it was set up, and how it actually played out in practice. The second section reviews the tangible outcomes of the program and describes the “funneling” of projects from the proposals in the initial applications, to the teams selected to participate in the program, to the finalist projects, to the eventual program winner (and runner up). The third section lists the specific lessons learned by the AIJC community, one by one, with a detailed explanation of each lesson and the evidence for it from the program. The fourth section gathers and analyzes these lessons to provide a succinct set of specific recommendations, organized for newsrooms, for operators of similar AI in news accelerator programs, for investors, and finally for the global news ecosystem. The fifth and final section draws on those lessons to look into the near future and offers some general opinions and guidance for changes that we might anticipate for news in the age of AI, as well as some guidance for preparing journalism for that transformation." (Introduction, page 4) more

"The AI in Journalism Futures (AIJF) project explored how artificial intelligence (AI) might fundamentally transform our information ecosystem over the next five to 15 years. Engaging nearly 1,000 global participants, including journalists, technologists, academics, and civil society advocates, the ... project’s objective was to understand the range of possibilities for long-term impact of AI on journalism using a scenario planning approach. An open call for applications produced short scenarios from 880 participants, from which 40 were selected to participate in a scenario planning workshop held in Piedmont, Italy, in April 2024. This workshop facilitated the refinement of five robust and plausible future scenarios. The five key scenarios developed were: “Machines in the Middle,” in which AI-driven newsgathering and news production enables newsrooms to operate essentially without human journalists; “Power Flows to Those Who Know Your Needs,” emphasizing the shift of power to those who best understand individual information needs in an AI-empowered information ecosystem; “Omniscience for Me, Noise for You,” depicting a societal divide where some are super-empowered by AI while others may be overwhelmed by distracting or low value information; “AI with Its Own Agency and Power,” envisioning AI systems operating in the information ecosystem with minimal human oversight; and “AI on a Leash,” in which societal or regulatory constraints limit AI’s transformative potential. The workshop produced near-unanimous agreement that AI would fundamentally transform the information ecosystem, but also difficulty in articulating specifically how this transformation might occur, with participants often defaulting to extensions of the status quo. There was considerable skepticism about the ability of traditional journalism institutions to adapt successfully to an AI-driven future, and participants tended to envision coming changes in terms of power shifts away from journalists, with little attention to how those changes might increase or decrease value for audiences. The results of the AIJF workshop underscore the urgency for stakeholders in journalism and civic information to engage in long-term planning and adaptation strategies to effectively navigate the coming AI-mediated information ecosystem. The scenarios and insights provided aim to guide these efforts, offering a foundation for understanding and thinking about journalism’s AI future." (Executive summary) more