256 | nº 29, pp. 255-274 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2019
Automated News in Brazilian television: a case study on the AIDA system (Globo-Brazil)
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
1. Introduction
The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) attracts scientists from all areas. The new “golden age” of Artificial Intelligence (Havenstein, 2005), which began in the new century, is connected to the advancement of big data technologies that have provided alternatives to the slow and complex engineering of manually coded knowledge (Russel & Norvig, 2016), opening a wide range of opportunities in all sectors. As inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil (2005) said, “Today, many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry. Most of these applications were research projects ten to fifteen years ago” (p. 206). In spite of this popularity, defining AI is not a simple task (Brennen, Howard & Nielsen, 2018; Grant, Seruwagi, & Dodd, 2018; Obozintsev, 2018). The question “What is artificial intelligence?”
Abstract:
Technological advancements have created a media ecosystem in which traditional journalism sees its existence strongly threatened by the emergence of new players. Social networks have created a competitive environment that, whether due to its dispersion or its capillarity, has relegated the mainstream media to a secondary role in the media ecosystem. Ironically, the technologies that threaten traditional journalism are also those that can save it; provided they are used correctly. Journalism, weakened by the economic crisis and with increasingly smaller newsrooms, has artificial intelligence as an opportunity to recover a certain centrality in the media ecosystem. This paper studies AIDA, a project from the Brazilian television network Globo. This project looked to automation as a way to avoid errors and ambiguities in the news. The study of the AIDA case, complemented by interviews, presents the challenges to achieve the automatization of news regarding electoral polls.
Keywords:
Journalism, automation, Artificial intelligence, innovation, AIDA.
Resumen:
Los avances tecnológicos han creado un ecosistema mediático en el que el periodismo tradicional ve su existencia fuertemente amena-zada por el surgimiento de nuevos actores. Las redes sociales han creado un entorno competitivo que, ya sea por su dispersión o por su capilaridad, relegaron los mainstream media a un rol secunda-rio en el ecosistema mediático. Irónicamente, las tecnologías que amenazan el periodismo tradicional son asimismo aquellas que pueden salvarlo, siempre que se utilicen correctamente. El periodis-mo, debilitado por los efectos de la crisis económica y con redaccio-nes cada vez más reducidas, tiene en la inteligencia artificial una oportunidad de recuperar cierta centralidad en el ecosistema de los medios. En este trabajo se estudia AIDA, un proyecto de la televisión brasileña Globo. Este proyecto buscó en la automatización una res-puesta para evitar errores y ambigüedades en las noticias. El estudio del caso AIDA, complementado con entrevistas, presenta los desafíos para lograr la automatización en la lectura y presentación de datos de sondeos electorales.
Palabras clave:
Periodismo, automatización, Inteligencia Artificial, innovación, AIDA.
Received: 27/07/2019 - Accepted: 12/11/2019
Recibido: 27/07/2019 - Aceptado: 12/11/2019
Ricardo Jorge Pinto. Professor of Communication at the Fernando Pessoa University, journalist at Lusa news agency and commentator on National Politics at RTP (Public Broadcast Television Station). He has a PhD in Media Studies by the University of Sussex (UK). As a journalist he has worked at several television, radio and newspapers, as reporter, editor and editor-in-chief. His preferential area of journalistic work is political information. His preferential areas of academic research are Journalistic Techniques, Ideologies of Media, Political Journalism, and Digital Communication.
