5.4. Technology, Artificial Intelligence and the Journalistic Profession

Some of the experts who participated on the panel have expressed a common concern about the possible indiscriminate use of bots, algorithms and other procedures related to Artificial Intelligence by media organisations. Media companies, agencies, and other content producers need to understand that the use of AI to automatically generate content might somehow eliminate workers from the business structure and reduce the number of journalists and media professionals, and this is a real possibility in a sector accustomed to being in permanent crisis.

After analysing the contributions made by the panel of experts, we are able to outline a discourse on how Artificial Intelligence should be integrated from a strategic perspective in organisations, using all of its potential to generate a culture of maximised synergy between the use of AI and the work of professional journalists. On one hand, the use of automated content generation will make it possible to offer more coverage in quantitative terms, while on the other hand, the liberation of journalists from time constraints could help them devote more hours in the day to working on real situations, issues and formats that require as much attention and human capacity as possible.

Artificial Intelligence will attempt to imitate, or in other words try to seem real, while journalists will have to differentiate their work, something that was generally agreed upon by the experts consulted. The human factor is essential in the production of content, and will continue as such, yet the editorialisation of AI processes (such as programming algorithms) will require the use of people as well. Journalists must have an important role in the organisation of tasks, supervision and process planning.

6. Conclusions

The content analysis of the sports reports, as well as the interviews with journalists and questionnaires sent to experts, show that the use of artificial intelligence for the automatic writing of informative texts offers more benefit than harm for this type of journalism. As can be seen from the results obtained in this paper, the use of the AnaFut bot for football match reports has meant faster production, a wider topic range, and greater diversification of El Confidencial’s coverage of sports competitions, and at the same time has liberated journalists from automated and routine tasks.

According to its promoters, the purpose of automation is not to replace journalists with algorithms, but to allow professionals to devote more time to reporting, searching for stories, and investigating, so that the information product gains as a whole in quality and differentiation. In this regard, it remains to be seen how this quality might be enhanced in years to come by generating more natural language that is increasingly being attained and enriched from the point of view of lexical variety and the introduction of more statistical data, the purpose of which is to make the language less repetitive, more agile, more analytical, and in short, more informative.