AI as just ‘another Indian’
Whew! It’s been a mental overload of data and knowledge to process and absorb on the “best practices” in protecting the truth coming out in the age of generative artificial information. This we got from the just concluded Information Integrity Forum 2024 held in Sydney. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Centre for Media Transition (CMT) organized the two-day forum. This year’s forum brought together four senior editors/journalists from each of the four invited countries, namely, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
For the Philippines, John Arrabe, GMA-7 senior assistant vice president for News Program; Arlene Burgos of ABS-CBN, head, Engagement & Partnerships; Mildred Galarpe, Cebu Sun Star associate publisher and yours truly for The Philippine STAR were nominated by the US embassy in Manila to participate in this forum.
At the end of the forum, Alexia Giacomazzi, CMT events and communications officer, summed up her over yearlong preparations for this event as “successfully held in two days only.” She disclosed the CMT worked out a grant to fund the forum from the US State Department.
Our discussions took off from last year’s Forum Report on how Australian newsrooms are adapting to generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI for short. The same report discussed “the impact on the production of public interest journalism and the challenges it poses for the integrity of the news information ecosystem” in the region.
A year later, the forum was taking place at a time when quite a number of Australian journalists were either laid off or on a work strike for the past few weeks. Many of the striking journalists are from media entities in Australia affected by the non-renewal of their “New Media Bargaining Code” with Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google. This Code was enforced by the government of Australia requiring these two “big tech” firms to pay news media outlets to host links to their articles on their sites.
The Code in Australia actually came on the heels of the “Online News Act” earlier approved into law in Canada. The Online News Act of Canada required all digital platforms to pay media outlets for hosting links to their news
