The obstacles affecting AI in Syrian newsrooms are divided between logistical, technical, and knowledge obstacles, in addition to government restrictions that limit access to some of these tools for journalists residing inside Syria.
In this file, Enab Baladi discusses AI benefits for journalists and asks experts, academics, and journalists about its risks to the profession and the consequences of keeping pace with this development or not on media institutions.
Tools for journalists and organizations
Artificial intelligence has been associated with various fields, including the world of journalism, some of which benefit journalists in their daily work and some that benefit media corporations in providing better access to their audience.
Shehata al-Sayed, CEO of the Osh Group for Technology and Artificial Intelligence Industries, told Enab Baladi that the field of journalism and media is witnessing rapid developments with the advent of AI technologies and its use in this field and that by using appropriate tools, journalists can be helped to produce high-quality news content in a faster time.
One of the most important areas in which artificial intelligence tools benefit journalists is the ability to generate texts and preliminary content based on available data and facts, which saves time and effort in preparing reports. Also, summarizing tools allow journalists to quickly summarize long texts to extract key points.
Machine translation enables journalists to cover events from different regions in multiple languages accurately and quickly, while smart search tools provide the ability to search a huge amount of information to obtain relevant quotes and figures, according to al-Sayed.
Advanced tools allow verification of information and allegations, while other tools provide the ability to produce visual and audio content, including graphics, video clips, and audio, with high quality and lower cost.
Thanks to advanced forecasting and data analysis techniques, audience patterns and trends can be detected, which helps produce more in-depth and specialized press materials, according to al-Sayed.
Investigative journalist Abdul-Latif Haj Mohammad, a graduate of the London School of Economics in the field of discovering artificial intelligence and studying in the field of ethics in artificial intelligence, told Enab Baladi that in the midst of the “artificial intelligence revolution,” countless tools have emerged that can help journalists in different ways. Among them is the Bard tool that Google recently launched in Arabic, and it is one of the other tools the company is working on, according to Haj Mohammad.
Google is testing a tool known internally as Project Genesis that could take details of current events, for example, and generate news content from them, people familiar with the matter told The New York Times in July.
Google offered this tool to major American news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and News Corp, which owns several media outlets, which expressed concern about the “ridiculing” of this tool for the effort of journalists in producing accurate and creative material.
The AI tool, according to News Corp, is a kind of personal assistant for journalists to automate some tasks and save time while taking into account ethical responsibility, and that it will help guide the publishing industry away from errors of generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT.
Technologies towards better audience reach
The 2023 annual report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlighted the public’s tendency to receive information through social media, and with the development of technologies added to these platforms using artificial intelligence, the report recommended that the media focus more on determining how social media can be used to attract new people to follow.
The report warned of a wave of personalized news content driven by artificial intelligence but potentially “unreliable.”
AI technology can be used to create news summaries and personalized recommendations based on user preferences and behaviors, which can help journalists reach a larger audience and create more relevant and engaging news, according to investigative journalist Haj Mohammad.
Among the artificial intelligence systems currently available, Haj Mohammad sees three technologies that publishers should be looking for and media leaders should invest in:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): These are artificial intelligence systems that can read, write, translate, and generate texts, such as the ChatGPT platform that is based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming technology.
- The recommendation system: It is an artificial intelligence technology based on machine learning and deep learning, and it can be used to customize sites. Examples of its uses include users receiving advertisements for products they searched for previously, and it is also used in article recommendations.
- Computer vision or image recognition: It is a technology that has the ability to recognize images.
Through the latest technology, representatives from eight global news organizations worked on a project called “AIJO” (an abbreviation of the first two letters of artificial intelligence and the first two letters of journalism in English), which takes advantage of the power of artificial intelligence in several criteria, including, to understand, identify and mitigate newsroom biases, by identifying men and women in images, and calculating how equal they appear in reports and news, similarly to how much ethnic diversity is in the published news space.
In turn, the CEO of Osh Technology Group, Shehata al-Sayed, said that through predictive modeling technology, current news events and public opinion trends can be predicted using data, which allows the production of relevant content.
Search engines within the news site must be optimized to make them smarter to meet the search needs of readers, and bots can be used to automate routine tasks, such as publishing content and monitoring social media, according to al-Sayed.
Syrian media corporations and their journalists face many obstacles to using the new tools of artificial intelligence, which threatens the possibility of benefiting from them in developing their work and the content presented to the public, whether it is visual, audio, or written.
These obstacles are divided into three main sections: financial, technical, and training.
Arabic language, cognitive deficiency, and authoritarian grip
The technical barriers that organizations and independent journalists face are directly related to two main factors. The first is that most of the new tools do not support the Arabic language.
This may create a major obstacle for the journalist during his work, as well as the media not investing in departments where programmers, data analysts, and journalists meet to design and test tools that serve journalistic work, whether through artificial intelligence or otherwise.
According to the Syrian journalist Murad al-Quwatli, Syrian institutions, like their Arab counterparts, are waiting for and trying to use what is produced in the United States and Europe, but not all tools and programs that serve journalistic work reach the region, and if they do arrive, their use is restricted by the fact that they are tools of the institution that developed and produced them. Therefore, it is rare for an Arab media outlet to have its own artificial intelligence tool.
The CEO of Osh Group, Shehata al-Sayed, told Enab Baladi that the most prominent difficulties are the scarcity of AI tools and applications in the Arabic language compared to the English language in terms of morphology, parsing, and grammar and that the leading companies in this field are preoccupied with working in the English language, as it is a global and dominant language.
In addition to the foregoing, the poor accuracy of some machine translation tools and automatic transcription of Arabic texts due to the complexities of the latter, the lack of availability of data and the huge Arabic content needed to train artificial intelligence models, and the difficulty of accessing advanced algorithms, because a limited number of companies control them.
According to al-Sayed, these problems can be solved by encouraging Arab startups to develop artificial intelligence tools suitable for the Arabic language and the needs of media content, making huge data sets available to the private and public sectors, to train and develop artificial intelligence algorithms, and establishing joint laboratories between universities and media institutions, to research and develop the use of AI in journalistic work.
This requires providing the necessary technical infrastructure, including devices and networks, to accommodate these technologies, according to the AI expert.
Haj Mohammad sees continuous learning as an important tool in the hands of journalists, and they can allocate time to learn about what is new and changes that occur in the profession of journalism.
One of the obstacles is the process of training on artificial intelligence tools, which may require a certain experience to deal with them in order to reach the best possible results, and in light of the lack of access to all technologies to the Syrian and Arab press institutions, this seems difficult.
Al-Quwatli pointed out that Europe and the United States already have institutions that provide training on artificial intelligence tools, but the Middle East and North Africa region needs more time.
Al-Quwatli believes that media organizations and journalists in Syria and the Arab region are still new to learning about the capabilities of artificial intelligence in journalistic work, which began practically with the ChatGPT boom in 2022.
He added to Enab Baladi that this does not mean that there are many journalists who have come a long way in increasing their skills by using artificial intelligence tools and analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and their experience can be used.
In addition to the above, there is no talk in the Syrian press or among Syrian journalists inside Syria about the use of artificial intelligence in their work, as the authorities block the websites of the most popular artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT and Bard.
The Syrian authorities are constantly blocking various websites and pages on the Internet, most of which are opposition-affiliated websites, including some useful global websites such as social media, but they later lifted the ban on social media after popular pressure.
Financial barriers to independent institutions
Most AI tools offer paid services with annual or monthly subscriptions, and some of these tools require special training for journalists to learn to use them, which leads to additional financial burdens for organizations or freelance journalists.
These obstacles pose a challenge to independent press organizations, which may not receive significant annual funding from a specific entity on a continuous and permanent basis.
Al-Quwatli says that the high financial cost of artificial intelligence programs and tools poses a challenge to invest in them, explaining that artificial intelligence tools are not limited to ChatGPT, but there are programs and tools dedicated to analyzing data, audience behavior, etc., and the cost of subscription is high.
While press institutions in the region are facing great financial challenges, they also find themselves facing a new challenge represented in investing in artificial intelligence tools, whether by producing them or subscribing to paid services, according to al-Quwatli.
New AI tools play an active role in journalism and its development, which prompted al-Quwatli to create his own guide in which he collected these tools while analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, pointing out that journalistic institutions that do not pay attention to AI will find themselves very late in the next five years.
The CEO of Osh, al-Sayed, told Enab Baladi that the high cost of owning artificial intelligence tools and the difficulty of financing them by media institutions is one of the major difficulties faced by journalistic work.
The establishment of financial support funds and business incubators to support artificial intelligence projects is one of the solutions that institutions can follow to solve this problem, according to al-Sayed.
For his part, journalist Haj Mohammad said that only large media companies have the necessary financial resources to invest in expensive technologies and develop their own algorithms in this field.
While al-Quwatli believes that there are few solutions in this context, it remains for journalists and institutions to resort to using free copies as a temporary solution despite their limited usefulness and the inability to use them for free for a long time.