Journalism has always been referred to as the fourth pillar of democracy in our country. Whether or not that statement holds any credibility is up for debate, and that will further be enhanced as the recent trends in AI will make people question the news and information put out by journalists will hold any credence and accountability, or as Orwell predicted in his book 1984 through the unknown entity known simply as Big Brother that there will be a time in the future where information will distort our views of the world and make question what’s real and what’s not.

Recently there have been various ways in which AI has impacted the fields of news writing and mass communication and one of the primary ways we to got to witness that was in the field of films, more especially in Hollywood, where a cabal of screenwriters staged a protest demanding that the producers of film companies stop using AI for storytelling on the visual medium and instead rely on the expansive and limitless potential of the human cognition to tell authentic stories which the audience can view, experience and be entertained by. This very protest could be used as a case study to question the gap between AI and human cognition which could witnessed in other domains requiring humans such as, can AI recognize human emotions, replicate it in fields such as storytelling to give the viewers a world to which they escape to to get rid of the mundane and tedious routine which operates like a cogwheel in machine, spinning at the same place in their day to day life as well as can it powerful enough to conduct an interview and frame the next line of questioning by studying the subjects emotions and reactions? Does it have the neural recognition to replicate the complex neural circuitry of the human brain and carry out tasks requiring loads of emotional and intellectual flexibility on the cognitive bandwidth?

For example, the movie business. One of the primary sources of enjoyment in many families in many societies across the globe, and one of how an individual will invest his or her hard-earned money by slogging five days a week purchasing a movie ticket for a Friday night show is by looking at the reviews. Now, if the reviews aren’t given by journalists who have a sense of movies and instead AI is used to publish a review, then it can make a disastrous film look like a masterpiece and make a masterpiece look like a disaster which at the end will waste both the audience and makers time and money. This could also be detrimental in the context of marketing and advertising, as AI won’t be able to produce raw organic graphic imagery for promotional purposes, which could be captured with the aid of a camera at a photoshoot and subsequently won’t entice a prospective buyer into buying the service or commodity of a particular enterprise.

When we speak about journalism and AI, one of the crucial ways in which it can affect credibility is with the tampering or manipulation of evidence. A field of journalism known as investigative journalism, in which reporters pick a project and spend almost a year investigating it, and then publish their report. Such a field could be drastically affected because of the legal implications surrounding AI. For instance, if the govt. doesn’t have an organized body to regulate the fair use of AI, then when investigative journalists publish their report, it could be tampered with the aid of AI, as a corrupt party might use it to tamper with the findings presented in the report and alter the facts. This situation appeared as a premonition in George Orwell’s 1984, in which the symbol of power known as Big Brother has banned citizens from keeping any form of record, be it personal or social, in a journal, and those who do so will be prosecuted. This scene in the novel mirrors the use of private and copyrighted data by AI tech startups or companies to train large AI models. While AI might be utilised by news organizations to engage in basic line of questioning, it doesn't emotional bandwidth to engage in a year-long complex research, interviewing, and publishing a report.

This is also crucial in dire situations such as war which the information given by war correspondents in their reports could be manipulated by the use of deepfake or audio manipulation to make world leaders appear anywhere and say information which they have never said, thus, inciting the public by giving false claims which have been doctored by the use of artificial means.

Another way in which people utilize the medium of mass communication is to make scrumptious meals in their day to day lives for their loved ones and guests but when AI intervenes onto television screens to tell people what they should be cooking it might lead to some less than toothsome meals because of several criterion that are important for cooking which a human being can recognize and which AI might not such as how to properly structure and mix the ingredients, the palate of the individuals consuming it, and despite being the same recipe how to apply individual creativity to make it your own.

It might be difficult for AI to break into several domains of entertainment as well such as singing, as much as people could use AI to bring back voices from the past by using their audio tracks to form songs on music which they would have loved their favourite singers to perform on people would still want a singer or songwriter to come up with their work which reflects the power of their voice, emotional reach and creativity and they could be compared with the original samples that an AI tool is producing to see which one is better. But people won’t be paying for an AI to perform, and the intellectual rights also say that the copyright and patent are meant for humans and not AI, and that songs sampled with the assistance of AI cannot be used for revenue and royalty purposes.

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