Artificial Intelligence and Journalism: Current Situation and Expectations in the Portuguese Sports Media

Abstract

With an important presence in various sectors of activity, Artificial Intelligence has also reached journalism, mostly in the field of natural-language processing, in the detection of informational trends or in the automatic production of texts. The fact that sport is one of the first to test AI is not a coincidence: it is a subject in which there is a lot of information online and where data is essential, so it is simpler to resort to natural language processing to transform them in texts with little or no human intervention; this work sought to understand if Artificial Intelligence is already used in Portuguese sports media, but also in mainstream media sports sections, whether they are newspapers, radios, TVs or online natives. A survey was sent only to decision-makers, that is, editors and coordinators. The study seeks to understand to what extent journalists expect AI to help journalism, what are the greatest difficulties of its use and what threats it represents. We can conclude that Portuguese sports journalism is aware of the potential of AI, although for now it is not used in newsrooms due to economic and professional constraints.