AI Hype Working Group: Responsible use of AI in journalism | Public Tech Media Lab

Welcome to the last session of our AI Hype Working Group! We are thrilled to have Natali Helberger (University of Amsterdam) joining us as a guest speaker. Find more information about this session below:

Proposition: Responsible use of AI in journalism begins with responsible procurement.

Abstract: The resilience of a democracy is invariably linked to the health of a society’s media ecosystem. In a recent report, the Dutch Council of Government Policy (WRR) characterized the democratic role of the media as providing the ‘infrastructures of the public space.”This also means that some technology choices are editorial and co-shape our public information ecosystem. I will argue that the constitutionally protected freedom of the media also entails duties and responsibilities, including a shared responsibility for shaping our media freedom infrastructure. Subject to the capacities and resources of individual media organizations, each media organization can have some active role in co-shaping the technological infrastructures for media freedom – be that through experimenting with value-sensitive recommender design, opting in favour of open source software or specialized start-ups, through cooperation with a national LLM project instead of concluding a licensing deal with Open AI, Llama, and Co.

Biography: Natali Helberger is Distinguished University Professor of Information Law and Digital Technology at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Executive Board of the Institute for Information Law (IViR). Helberger is an elected member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences (KHMW), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and the Social Science Council of the KNAW. Helberger’s research focuses on how AI and ADS (algorithmic decision systems) are changing society and what the implications are for law and governance. She is the founder and co-director of the AI, Media & Democracy Lab, and of the AlgoSoc (Public Values in the Algorithmic Society) Gravity Consortium. In her function as expert, Natali advises the European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, and national regulators and civil society organisations.

Read more and register to attend on the Public Tech Media Lab’s website. Note: Event times are in Central Daylight Time (CDT).