Use of artificial intelligence in synthetic media: first newsrooms without journalists

Abstract

The boom in artificial intelligence and automated technology in the journalistic profession has given rise to what are called synthetic media (Crusafon, 2022), media outlets that produce and publish texts, audio, videos, and other news content through processes executed solely by algorithms, without any intervention from journalists. This research has several objectives: to identify the first synthetic media outlets already operating, to describe how these newsrooms without journalists work, to better understand the type of content they produce, and to find out whether these are isolated and ephemeral operations or if, on the contrary, they mark the beginning of a trend toward journalism without the direct intervention of journalists. To this end, we have used an exploratory methodology, enabling us to identify four synthetic media outlets, which have been taken as an analysis sample: JX Press Corp (Japan); Reuters News Tracer (United Kingdom), News Republic (France), and Videre AI (Spain). An analysis of the news content on each project’s web pages was combined with in-depth semistructured interviews with the heads of technology and communication of the three European ventures. The Japanese initiative has no human staff, so its chatbot was the only way to obtain information. The purpose was to learn about the initiatives’ news production process, their impact on the journalistic profession, and their viability. This analysis helps demonstrate that the journalistic world’s reliance on artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly evident and that communication agencies are the first companies to invest in developing and distributing synthetic content to benchmark media. These initiatives, although still limited, are the most recent step in the process of gradually integrating artificial intelligence into news production.