House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee inquiry:
The future of news: impartiality, trust and technology
My name is Dr Michael Samuel and I am responding to the call for evidence regarding “The future of news: impartiality, trust and technology” as a Lecturer in Digital Film and Television at the University of Bristol. My response concerns question 2 — How is generative AI affecting news media business models and how might this evolve?
I ask: What is the future of the news website, and what will be the ramifications of the evolution of the AI web browsers and apps on journalistic integrity and the business of news?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and generative Large Language Models (LLM) such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Bard, and Meta’s Llama, are known to scrape the internet, collate data and present it in a condensed form. However, as we also know, though the technologies are evolving exponentially, in its current state, this information can be unreliable and, in some cases, incomprehensible, leaving users to interpret the data. This could have profound ramifications on the future of news.
Whilst there is a degree of scepticism around said technologies, there is a drive by certain companies to put in place sophisticated algorithms and validation tools to ensure the accuracy of data. One such company is The Browser Company, creators of the ARC platform. ARC is built around a sophisticated formula-based algorithm, which, when the user asks a question (for example, “which music artist won the most Grammy awards in 2024?”), finds that information from six sources, extracts key points, gathers pull quotes, and assembles all the information in the form of a custom-made webpage that is logically ordered and, importantly, all information is correctly attributed to its original source. The official YouTube channel has a video explaining the technology, and the founder, Josh Miller, has given comprehensive interviews on The Verge podcast.
While I recognise The Browser Company’s efforts as an optimistic turn for technologies that are generally treated with scepticism, particularly in relation to news and scholarship, my concerns are directed toward the future of the news website and news channel as news outlet and source.
Questions
What is the future of the news website (such as https://www.bbc.co.uk/news) if certain AI tools (such as the ARC browser, Copilot and Chat GPT) are increasingly suggesting that users will not need to visit the original source website for news information in the traditional sense? No longer will we need to Google a news item and click on a link to be diverted to the original website from which that information can be found to source information. Instead, an algorithm will search for us, compile information from a selection of websites, and present it in app.
Will we gradually see the decline of the news website?
Will less users result in a lack of justification for maintaining a news website, if user footfall is down?
How might AI tools and custom browsers such as ARC affect the integrity of PSB and the direction of the license fee funds (which, in the UK, partly go toward the development of electronic resources)?
Lastly, with a turn toward text-based news, where does this leave neurodiverse users?
February 2024
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