Journalists are at the frontline of the digital revolution and need to adapt to new technologies while also maintaining their core mission of informing, investigating, and upholding public interest.
This is according to former journalist and current First Secretary (Trade and Economic) at the New Zealand High Commission in Suva, Adham Crichton while speaking during the World Media Freedom Day celebration in Suva last week.
He said the advent of AI was expected to significantly alter the media landscape, with both benefits and threats.
“AI provides powerful tools, on one hand, which can assist with your work, automating research, analysing data and even generating some content but with these advancements also come threats,” Crichton said.
“There’s a spread of deep fakes, bias within the algorithm, and the potential for misinformation to be created faster than it can be verified.
“Journalists do more than just report facts, which is what AI can do.”
He said misinformation and disinformation had, to some extent, continued to erode the public’s trust in the media and to be used as a pretext for repression.
“Powerful companies, including social media platforms, have not always taken adequate steps to promote information integrity or pay fairly for the content that you produce.
“Many media outlets are struggling to remain financially viable and face challenging business environments with dwindling advertising revenue.
“Now, AI seems set to shake up the industry.”
Crichton said that at the end of the day journalists were not only watchdogs of governments and corporations in the town hall, “but also the very technologies that are shaping our society and your profession”.
Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes as many mistakes as humans because it draws from imperfect data that humans produce, says British High Commissioner to Fiji Dr Brian Jones.
During the World Press Freedom Day 2025 last week, he said trusting AI for information would be a “foolhardy path”.
“So, trusting it wholly for your information, your entertainment, and your education, I think would be a foolhardy path to take,” Dr Jones said.
“Probably as long as I’m alive, there will still be a role for human journalists, ensuring that it’s ethically correct, ensuring that it doesn’t harm, and ensuring that the public interest test is met.”
He said that according to Microsoft Pilot, some of the areas where AI would make significant impact by 2030 was content creation, news generation, video content and personalised news stories.
“AI will be heavily involved in generating news articles, video content and personalised news stories. AI tools will be routinely used in newsrooms to help translate content in real time and create videos with digital avatars.
“AI will tailor content to individual preferences, ensuring that users receive news and entertainment that aligns with their interests.”
Dr Jones said this would allow journalists to focus more on in-depth and investigative reporting.
“It will automate many routine tasks, data analysis, as we talked about report generation and allowing human journalists to focus on more in-depth and investigative reporting.
“So, we need to keep up with it, and we need to use it, both as a public policy, people like me sitting in governments trying to change and drive behaviour, we need to be aware of how we can feed AI machines with the good stuff to help protect people, help improve health, help improve development and the economy.”
Dr Jones said we must always remember that AI doesn’t look forward, it only feeds on information from the past.
