"Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Investigative Journalism"

by Stray, Jonathan (2019)

Abstract

AbstractMany have envisioned the use of AI methods to find hidden patterns of public interest in large volumes of data, greatly reducing the cost of investigative journalism. But so far only a few investigative stories have utilized AI methods, in relatively narrow ways. This paper surveys what has been accomplished in investigative reporting using AI techniques, why it has been difficult to apply more advanced methods, and what sorts of investigative journalism problems might be solved by AI in the near term. Journalism problems are often unique to a particular story, which means that training data is not readily available and the cost of complex models cannot be amortized over multiple projects. Much of the data relevant to a story is not publicly accessible but in the hands of governments and private entities, often requiring collection, negotiation, or purchase. Journalistic inference requires very high accuracy, or extensive manual checking, to avoid the risk of libel. The factors that make some set of facts ?newsworthy? are deeply sociopolitical and therefore difficult to encode computationally. The biggest near-term potential for AI in investigative journalism lies in data preparation tasks, such as data extraction from diverse documents and probabilistic cross-database record linkage.

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Themes

AI and Journalism

Links to Reference

• https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1630289
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1630289
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21670811.2019.1630289?casa_token=LlrDr3sHHrEAAAAA:ahmL7YDdQPRrtPVZuQLw2thq2oZEEAytC5VWGHVX-C2phZQPV71tww3zdg5NtkVdlf_kDOb28_Zl5g
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21670811.2019.1630289?casa_token=S3IYBwq1-bQAAAAA:PPgoytRdyjmMMX-lzA_6lQaaMnK5ea-TcGxZd-URqfKD0rds13eaNARt2LaAYx82MYNG67OPLHWhKQ

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