Converting text documents like PDFs to spreadsheets is tedious and expensive work. To see how well AI tool ChatGPT can extract data from PDFs, data journalist Brandon Roberts wrote a Python script to convert two document sets to spreadsheets.
The largest-ever African Investigative Journalism Conference (#AIJC2022) drew 375 attendees from 51 countries to Africa’s premier muckraker gathering. The conference looked into how AI is driving a “third wave of journalism,” which new tools and resources are available to watchdog reporters, and showcased some of the world-class exposés being produced on the continent.
Rainforest Investigations Network fellow Hyury Potter used data reporting and machine learning to investigate the link between clandestine airstrips and illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon during the past two years.
Mattia Peretti, manager of JournalismAI at the London School of Economics, discusses the 10 things reporters should know about how artificial intelligence can impact journalism.
The workings of the Chinese Communist Party are shrouded in secrecy, but ahead of the party congress later this year The South China Morning Post published a detailed guide on the key power players. Also this week, an investigation into the arbitrary nature of military justice in the United States, an analysis of Russia’s election voter turnout using artificial intelligence, and charts celebrating Serena Williams’ tennis career.
For newsrooms looking to deepen their understanding of how artificial intelligence could be used for investigative reporting, the 150-year-old Argentinian newspaper La Nación is blazing a trail and has produced a diverse range of stories assisted by AI technologies and has created an AI lab.
Satellite imagery provides information that can enhance the ability to write compelling narratives about the state of our planet, cutting across multiple beats. But such a tool tends to be complex and out of the reach for many journalists, so this guide offers a process that reporters interested in covering the climate crisis can use for story projects.
With more sophisticated AI technologies emerging, researchers warn that “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem. As a result, a team of researchers that set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.
Media organizations worldwide are increasingly using artificial intelligence for information gathering, storytelling, and news distribution. Journalist Bennie Mols writes that given the potential transformative power of AI in journalism media organizations must consider how best to use it to fulfill their mission while reflecting on the impacts that AI has on democracy, diversity, and public values.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the world in English, we found a helpful database that’s tracking government responses to COVID-19 with the help of 400 researchers, a multimedia project on how eight journalists from around the world are coping with reporting during the pandemic, and a piece on how autocrats are cracking down on independent news sites.
