Six months on from the launch of ChatGPT, 9 things that media companies have learned about AI

"You can imagine how my content leadership thinks about ChatGPT! But we’re going to experiment with it, and we’re going to learn from our audience too.” Bonnie Kintzer, President/CEO TMB

On November 30th 2022 a tech product was unveiled that has the potential to change the content industry forever.

Via a flurry of tweets and a modest, mainly technical blog post on its website, AI innovators OpenAi announced the launch of a new machine learning-driven conversational tool ChatGPT.

In reality it was the equivalent of a large explosive device being detonated, one that has created major fissures in both the media and tech industries.

In the nearly six months that has elapsed since ChatGPT’s launch, we have seen a response from Google (Bard), endless discussions about the impact that AI will have on SEO and tentative experiments from media companies looking to harness ChatGPT and AI generally to improve productivity and rationalise processes.

There will be many topics of conversation at FIPP Congress 2023, but a large number of sessions will reference the impact of the technology in some form or other. The conversations will equip attendees to learn more about AI frameworks. They will also hear case studies on how their peers are using the technology and learn about the AI tools they can start using now.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has delivered both a tactical and strategic problem for media leaders across the globe.

The tactical one is ‘how should they respond to the launch of the product and indeed Google’s Bard which followed in spring 2023? Should they start experimenting with it? Is now the time to get ahead of their rivals and deliver new products and brands that have AI at their core? 

The strategic one, which will be addressed in much greater depth at FIPP Congress 2023, is how can the media use Artificial Intelligence across the board to rationalise processes, create new opportunities and deliver new revenue streams? If so, what are the opportunities, what are the legal and moral ramifications (copyright, fake news etc), and what are the implications for SEO? Ultimately what does ChatGPT and more generally AI mean for content creators?

What is fascinating is that six months on from ChatGPT’s debut, the hype has receded and we are witnessing some nuanced and intelligent debate.

So what has happened in the last few months?

“AI, including ChatGPT, is a major current topic. At WELT we work on this in different task forces testing different use cases. Our aim is to find ways to optimise current processes that make the work of our valuable journalists, tech teams or other units easier.” Carolin Hulshoff Pol, CEO of the WELT Group at Axel Springer (pic above), who is a keynote speaker at FIPP Congress 2023.

1 There has been a lot of experimentation

Since the November launch of ChatGPT many publishing companies have been experimenting with the tool. Some in public (BuzzFeed, CNET and Sports Illustrated to name three), but mainly in private as execs begin to work out how they might incorporate it into the workflows of their journalists. 

2 The experimentation has been global

ChatGPT has been used across the world. At FIPP Congress there will case studies from Denmark, Portugal and Chinese Taipei as well as key innovators from the US and UK.

3 It hasn’t just been journalists who have been using it in media companies - marketers have been excited by its potential too

Much of the use of ChatGPT has been positive for journalists, enabling them to rationalise research processes and create evergreen content on the fly. 

The technology is increasingly being harnessed by marketers in media companies who use it to generate their own content. Marketers have also been experimenting with a number of AI-based applications such as AI-based audience segmentation tools like Piano and DMC, as well as AI-driven chatbots and email marketing tools.

4 Human intervention is a must, especially when using ChatGPT for content creation

One key lesson that has been learned is that ChatGPT is most effective when supplemented by human interaction. Its users need to understand how to use it, how to guide it to deliver the most useful content and how to continually ask questions to develop the content,

Simply publishing reams of AI-mined content runs significant risks for the reputation of media companies. It can get things wrong. It can only access information created before 2022. Its prose can be stilted and monotone. Human intervention is essential to ensure the content is not only accurate but also engaging.

5 No one really knows what the impact will be on SEO and the creation of evergreen content

“The hype and excitement in the SEO industry aside, the impact over time will remain limited. Leading search engines are much less interested in how content is created but rather whether it addresses user needs accurately.” Kaspar Szymanski, co-Founder of technical search agency SearchBrothers in an interview which will be published shortly by Di5rupt/MX3 Collectif.

Six months on and the jury is still very much out on the impact that AI will have on SEO and indeed the type of content that media companies should create. 

There were initially fears that the value of evergreen features would be undermined with AI bots swamping the web with low-grade content. Kaspar Szymanski, thinks that the impact of the platform on evergreen content has been overstated and that media companies who build brands using longtail content should continue with their strategy.

“All publishers, regardless whether they are media companies or otherwise, should focus on evergreen content, if they can. There already are both manual penalties as well as algorithms specifically geared towards detecting and tackling low quality content. That’s not to say that utilising AI generated content is considered an offence in every instance. Whether AI generated content may pose a policy violation and therefore a serious SEO liability depends on the quality of the content published. Publishers in need of guidance are well advised to embrace Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content.”

6 There is uncertainly over regulations

At the current time no one seems certain how AI tools will impact the future of search. Both Microsoft and Google are incorporating ChatGPT and Bard respectively into the search offerings - but how far will they go?

The issue for publishing companies is that at the current time anyone looking for content is invariably directed towards that created by professional media organisations, igniting an engagement and potential advertising revenue for the publishers. If the search engines major on AI-created round ups with no attribution the tech companies could find themselves at loggerheads once again with both the media and eventually the EU and governments across the globe.

7 There are some great potential uses of AI in content creation that media companies are working on

What has become clear over the last year is that there will be significant opportunities for media companies using AI to create content. At the moment though they may still be work in progress.

Rafat Ali, CEO and Founder of travel industry platform Skift (who will be appearing at FIPP Congress 2023 via video) says his company is already working on some interesting concepts.

“Can we create a q&a relationship with our users based on our knowledge base? So one of the tools that we're working on is how to create a Q&A relationship based on training the AI. The Skift Intelligent Agent will be able to gather data based on all the stories we've done, and quickly spin up an answer to whoever is asking. We're thinking of these as premium tools for our paid subscribers and not necessarily a public tool.”

8 There are likely to be implications because of AI that the industry has not yet even thought of.

Dan Pacheco, the Peter A. Horvitz Endowed Chair in Journalism Innovation, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, and another FIPP Congress 2023 keynote speaker has experimented with AI in a number of ways and he wonders if it will make us even lazier than we already are...

“The bigger thing I worry about is that, just as search engines and mobile devices make it possible for us to outsource memory like phone numbers and facts to technology, AI will make some people even lazier. That said, Plato famously worried that the written word would make it harder for people to remember things, and he was right about that. But isn't it better to be able to read Homer's Odyssey instead of memorising and repeating the entire tale across generations?”

9 Many media leaders are optimistic about the potential of AI. 

Rafat Ali, believes that over time really useful tools will emerge.

“Why you should be an optimist in Age of AI is because if you're pessimist then you're dead. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing that you control. For me, it's the tools that make potentially the creation of media a lot more efficient. They want to take some of the drudgery out of the low level tasks that either journalists or people within the media have to do and to use these tools to make your work more efficient and better.”

Other AI contributors at FIPP Congress 2023
 

• Danish author and media transformation expert Steffen Dambourg will provide a strategic perspective on AI and the next wave of transformation and change for the media industry.

• Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, CE of Impress in the UK, will address the potential legal minefield the popularisation of AI brings. She will also discuss the recent ethical code for journalists to account for AI transparency in the face of an expected explosion in fake news.

• Ana Rocha de Paiva, Senior News Program Manager, Google EMEA, Portugal will present Lessons from the JournalismAI project 

• Tav Klitgaard, CEO, Zetland, Denmark will focus on AI-fuelled journalism: Harnessing technology to elevate your storytelling 

• Richard Lee, Chief Integration Officer, The News Lense, Chinese Taipei will discuss How generative AI enables a regional media group to meet demands of growing a global audience 

• Juan Señor, President of INNOVATION Media Consulting, will share the best innovation examples worldwide and explain how companies use challenging environments to create new opportunities. He will also discuss whether or not AI will be a catalyst for change.

• Bonnie Kintzer, President and CEO of TMB will also reference AI as she looks at how legacy media companies can evolve to embrace new opportunities

Hear all these speakers and more

For more on this and other conversations on trends such as AI, monetisation, storytelling and more, join us at the FIPP World Media Congress in Cascais, Portugal, on 6-8 June. More at fippcongress.com

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