The European Investigative Journalism Conference

How to use AI and maintain your journalistic ethics

Robots write articles, select news, edit pictures. They research, they personalize our front pages and target them to the individual. How can we put robots – or artificial intelligence – to the best use and make sure that our ethical standards in journalism are still respected and maintained?

Andreas Marckmann Andreassen

Danish digital journalist Andreas Marckmann Andreassen has spent a year researching this, and his book “How automatization will change the media” hits the streets on September 14. It also hits the mail service, because it is considered so important that the Danish media industry funds that it will be distributed to all of 18,000 members of the Danish Journalists’ Union.

The book builds on Andreas’ international research and travel, including more than 70 interviews with media people, scholars and technologists – from New York Times to local media houses. An English version of the book will be published in 2021.

At Dataharvest Digital, Andreas will share his 9 principles for ethical automation. How do we safeguard journalistic ethics in automated journalism? How do we ensure transparency and avoid bias, how do we secure checks and balances in the system, and how do we take responsibility when it fails? Who needs to understand the system – and what about privacy?

Charlie Beckett

We are also proud to announce that the moderator of the session is professor Charlie Beckett of London School of Economics, founding director of Polis, the think-tank for research and debate around international journalism and society in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

The data journalism weeks begins on September 29 – register for Dataharvest Digital here! We open on Tuesday September 1!