Yesterday afternoon I sat in on a panel entitled “Coding for the News: Ethics, Machines and Newsrooms“, which was a panel regarding the potential artificial intelligence will have on the news industry. The panel was moderated by Executive Editor for Editorial Operations Data & Innovation at Reuters, Reg Chua; and featured DocumentCloud co-founder and professor Aron Pilhofer as well as Stanford Professor Cheryl Phillips.

The biggest role AI seems to play in the newsroom comes in the form of data sifting—where algorithms would form and computers would be trained to search through significant amounts of data to find what it believes are the most important stories. The amount of data these computers would be looking through is far too much for journalists to look through themselves; thus allowing not only faster results, but the ability for journalists to spend more time on actually creating that content and putting hours into the reporting vs research.

To that last point, Phillips especially emphasized the role AI could play in actually creating content themselves for more “trivial”, if you will, coverage. This would also allow for journalists to spend a significant more amount of time on more important stories which require the extra hours of work.

Although Phillips and Chua seemed a little more optimistic when it came to the prospect of AI-content creation, Pilhofer expressed clear dissent stating ““If AI can do that as good as you can, then it probably wasn’t journalism to begin with.”

Others have expressed similar thoughts as Phillips, “The work of journalism is creative, it’s about curiosity, it’s about storytelling, it’s about digging and holding governments accountable, it’s critical thinking, it’s judgment — and that is where we want our journalists spending their energy,” said Lisa Gibbs, the director of news partnerships for The A.P.

The final point that was made and agreed on by all three members of the session was the lack of technology-skilled workers in a newsroom. It was pointed out time and time again that when thinking about AI and all of these computer algorithms that can actually be tools in a newsroom, at the end of the day you don’t really have anyone who understands how they work. As you’ll see in the interview above I brought up this point to Pilhofer and asked about the possibility of tech companies actually getting into the news business—which we are already seeing with Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post.

Regardless of anyone’s preferences, AI is coming into the newsroom one way or another. But the role it plays and the extent of its creation of content depends on the organization and the ability for an outlet to find another way out of the downward spiral most (if not all) traditional news outlets have been facing in recent years.