The next big thing – artificial intelligence

The Next Big Thing has arrived – artificial intelligence (AI). But there is nothing new about AI – it has been part of everything from credit checks to customer ordering to citizen surveillance for a long time. For example, AI first ‘wrote’ a sports story in 2009, which became a model for the machinery’s extension into other culture industries (Brambilla Hall, 2018). The Los Angeles Times has had a Quakebot since 2014 that connects instantly to the newsroom with a story when a serious tremor is sensed in the Southland by the nation’s Geological Survey. Following a quick check of this draft by the human on duty, the story is published. Information on the system is catalogued under ‘people’ by the paper. There are utopic and dystopic components to the discourse of artificial intelligence. It is seen as a force disrupting the clientelismo that has dogged much of the world. Large sets of machine-collated and -sifted data have exposed international ruling-class concealment of wealth and influence, sorting different forms of oligarchic malfeasance so reporters can make sense of them (Broussard, 2018, pp. 44–46). There is a grand future for such work. Interlocking directorates and oligarchical tendencies mean that Colombia, for example, is normally run by politicians with significant media interests. The prospect of instant, unedited, on-line access to their activity has excited many (Montaña, 2014). In Brazil, Aos Fatos used the bot Fátima to counter fascist lies during the 2022 Presidential election, and some journalists find automated fact-checking improves their work experience (Johnson, 2023; Manfredi Sánchez & Ufarte-Ruiz, 2020). It is also claimed that AI can prevent mass violence by alerting activists and authorities in ‘real time’ to its occurrence and establishing whether the testimony of eyewitnesses is part of a pattern (Yankoski et al., 2021). The World Economic Forum and Reuters even see AI as a key riposte to climate change (Neslen, 2021). UN agencies collude in these unsubstantiated claims via ‘AI for the Planet’. Needless to say, public relations agencies have been major players in this mythology, planting stories around the globe (Bourne, 2019). Meanwhile, AI agents have untold negative impacts on the climate, thanks to their gigantic carbon footprints (Heikkilä, 2022; Jones, 2018; Lacoste et al., 2019; Strubell et al., 2019). More prosaically than the idea of salvation from climate change, Bayerischer Rundfunk deploys the machinery to moderate online comments. The Associated Press generates shot lists to organize a bibliography of its video holdings (‘Artificial Intelligence is Remixing’, 2023). Such uses of the technology may appear quite mundane, but they have serious implications for the quality of work and the labor process alike. For example, Dataminr®’s ‘AI for Modern Newsrooms’ is favored by more than 650 news desks worldwide. It promises ‘the earliest possible indications of breaking news’, ensuring journalists will ‘gain an edge in covering the stories that matter most to their audiences’. Al Jazeera, CNN, DW, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Post are listed as satisfied customers. The system works like this: the company investigates algorithmically the dark and deep webs, ‘social’ media, blogs, sensors attuned to the internet of things, and digital audio. Alerts from these sources provide virtually instantaneous information to subscribers, based on their thematic and geographical desires. This is