Artificial intelligence takes first big bite out of print media

The media can be prone to navel-gazing, and as Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan suggested this week in an interview with Wired magazine, that can surface in how it approaches the hottest of hot topics: artificial intelligence (AI).

“The growth of AI in terms of weapons systems and the problems that it is going to create have been very apparent for a lot of years,” the director of the forthcoming Oppenheimer biopic said. “Few journalists bothered to write about it. Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis.”

Nolan has a point. The explanation for such insularity springs in part from the economics of the industry. Journalists and their editors inherently understand what is happening to newspapers more than they understand weapons systems technology – to gain expertise in the latter would require time and money their employers are unwilling to afford them.

Increasingly, media groups seem rather more interested in using AI to replace human employees. Germany’s leading tabloid Bild, for instance, is cutting almost a third of its staff, closing six regional offices and embracing AI to ease cost pressures as part of a “digital only” strategy, it said this week.

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Bild, owned by publishing giant Axel Springer, will soon begin dispensing with “products, projects and processes” with no economic future, and that includes “colleagues who have tasks, which in the digital world can be replaced by AI or other processes”. About 200 people will lose their jobs. “This sounds brutal and it is,” Bild editor-in-chief Marion Horn said to staff.

The Bild move does not mark the first time that job losses – either in the media or elsewhere – and AI have been mentioned in the same headline and it won’t, of course, be the last. But in truth the push to harness the possibilities of AI is just one component of a brutality that was coming in print media anyway, with or without ChatGPT.

The news publishers looking most intently to the future are the same ones who are most ready to wind down legacy operations: European media group Mediahuis – which owns the Irish Independent, Sunday World, Belfast Telegraph and other newspapers in Ireland – is another example. It has invested in various AI technologies and said it will likely stop weekday printing here within the next decade.

The two parallel trends do not mean vast swathes of news media will become the sole product of generative AI, or anything close to it. But it does mean journalists may have to reinvent themselves – again – to survive.