When Melissa Heikkilä looks back on her past four years writing about artificial intelligence (AI), two key things jump out to her, one good, one bad.
“It’s the best beat… AI is a story about power, and there are so many ways to cover it,” says the senior reporter for magazine MIT Technology Review. “And there are so many interesting, and eccentric people to write about.”
That’s the positive. The negative, she says, is that much of the wider media’s coverage of AI can leave a lot to be desired.
“There is more hype and obfuscation about what the technology can and cannot actually do,” says Ms Heikkilä. “This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphizing AI technologies, and mythologizing tech companies.”
Go back to early 2022, and AI was a little searched for term on Google. It had a so-calledGoogle Trend scoreof just 11, with 0 being not searched for at all, and 100 indicating that something is the hottest of hot topics.
Last year, you wouldn’t be surprised to know, AI surged in Google Trends to 100. The BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman says it is good to see AI now attracting so much attention, but that this puts a responsibility on the media to report on it accurately.
“AI is going to have an impact on all of our lives sooner rather than later, if not already, and so it deserves media scrutiny,” she says. “I think the media tends to use the term AI as an umbrella term for lots of different types of the tech.
“I also think generative AI is behind the majority of this latest buzz – that is, tools which create content, like text, images, video and audio. ChatGPT has a lot to answer for!
“I do think journalists have a tendency to focus on the negatives, and I’d like to see more headlines about the positive uses of AI – formatting new medicines, for example, and providing breakthroughs in the search for nuclear fusion – alongside the risks it poses.”