Five questions about the future of media with Ritu Kapur - Co-founder and managing director of "The Quint" - a digital news platform focussing on news surrounding the Indian subcontinent. Kapur is on the advisory board at Oxford's Reuter institute for the study of journalism , the World Editors Forum at WAN-IFRA and Future News Worldwide.
What are the most interesting AI use cases you have recently experienced in your field of work and why?
" The use of AI there has so far been largely in translations, for metadata optimizations, summary writing, but now it's moving towards personalization of format. For example, if there’s a long read, a user may want to read it only as bullet points, or just want to listen to it as an audio, or want it as a quick video. Personalization of format is a huge area of focus in digital publishing globally and AI is being used to build that. Another interesting use is to make news more interactive with chat bots and personal AI assistants. Our CMS, built by our tech company Quintype, has added a lot of AI innovation. It’s used by publishers in the Middle East, some in Europe, and several in the Indian subcontinent, including Bangladesh.
We are also fact checkers, so we use some AI tools to speed up the process of factchecking. For example, we use AI tools like ElevenLabs to figure out whether a piece of audio is genuine or fake. AI can also help determine whether a video is AI-generated or genuine, and can even help date the video to prevent disinformation by showing when the video was originally made."
What changes, influenced by artificial intelligence, can you identify in your field of work?
"While many newsrooms are using AI to increase the volume of content for search traffic optimization, we have steered in the opposite direction. Three years ago, we used to publish around 150 pieces of content daily. Today, we publish more than 20 or 30 pieces.
We’ve moved entirely away from commodity news – news that is available everywhere. We are only focusing on enterprise and exclusive journalism, either in video format, podcast, or text.
Like several publishers we at The Quint are also using it a lot on the back end and product, like for recommendations and speeding up publishing stories. But we largely use Gen AI towards creative uses. For instance we use Midjourney for visualising some of our videos and our interactive immersives.
We do block AI from crawling our content. We don’t want our content to be exploited. The publishing world made a mistake when social media came along, when platforms like Facebook were distributing news for us. We saw how much leverage we lost in terms of revenue and control of our content. We don’t want to make that mistake again with
AI."
How big do you think the impact of artificial intelligence will be in your field of work and what are the characteristics?
"I believe AI will be beneficial for taking over repetitive tasks, freeing up journalists to focus on on-ground reporting and investigations. However, we will not use AI to generate journalistic content or find stories.
We’re not using AI enough yet, but I think a lot of newsrooms are now using AI for data journalism, which I think is a very good use of AI. It can sift through vast amounts of data and pull stories from it. For example, we used ChatGPT for a big story on how the government is taking contributions from large companies via electoral bonds. This was very dense data, but we were able to use ChatGPT to extract stories from the data.
However, we’re still in the early days of AI development. All predictions are that it’s going to grow and change very fast. We’re really at the 'dial-up modem' stage of AI; it hasn’t fully arrived yet, but it’s going to impact us much more as it develops. We need to be constantly learning and upskilling on AI, and we need to decide at what stage and in what areas to use it in journalism. It should help journalism and support it, not take over the core editorial.
We are also very circumspect right now. When social media came into digital publishing. we were like kids in a candy store, wanting to grab every new shiny thing, and that ended up being damaging for publishers. Now, we see AI as something we need to carefully navigate. For example, search traffic is very important for digital publishers, but AI-generated summaries on platforms like Google threaten that. When you search for something, you now get an AI summary, so you don’t necessarily need to click through to a publisher’s site. This change could diminish traffic for independent publishers like us.
There is also way too much hype around AI right now. Sundar Pichai said something I agree with: ‘the risk of underinvesting in AI infrastructure is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting’. It can end up doing more harm to your brand than good."
What development would you wish for in your industry? How could technological innovation/artificial intelligence contribute?
"What I would like to see is that we develop the use of AI in such a way that the experience a user gets when they come to our website is something they can’t get anywhere else—not on Google, not on Facebook, not on Instagram. That then becomes the reason why people come to our bespoke site. The challenge is how to use AI to draw readers directly to us. For example, I might only want to read ten bullet points on a story rather than a 2,000-word article. I want to get the story, but in a format I prefer. And maybe, eventually, we’ll reach a point where we no longer need to rely on big tech platforms for distribution.
However, the precursor to this is to have a strong brand identity where people know they can get a certain type of journalism or content only from us. We can use AI towards predictive analytics to understand that better.
Eventually, AI could help create personalized user experiences, so people feel compelled to come directly to our site. For instance, a user might want to consume content as bullet points or audio, and this kind of personalization can be a powerful way to differentiate our platform from others. I would love for AI to contribute to this vision.
But it has to go beyond technology. First, you have to have a strong enough brand where people recognize the type of journalism you do. They need to know that they’re coming to us for a specific kind of content or storytelling. Once you have that, AI can support it by streamlining personalization or making content consumption more efficient, but the brand is key."
What eventual risks and/or threats do you see that come with technological development?
"One of the major risks is that AI comes with a lot of bias. If I depend on AI to generate content, it’s possible that the inherent bias in the AI system will aTect that content. For example, when I use Midjourney and type in a prompt, if I ask for an image of a woman feeding her baby, I often get an image of a white woman. Even if I get an image of a brown woman, the features are often Caucasian rather than Asian. That’s just one example, but this bias exists in all kinds of AI-generated content. This is a big concern, especially because the people developing AI are largely from the Western world, and that bias can seep into the system.
Another risk is that AI can be used to generate large volumes of content that isn’t necessarily quality content. This will only add to the clutter and information overload in the system. Right now, there’s already too much information out there, and AI-generated content could bury valuable journalism under all that noise.
There’s also a risk that Indic languages could be neglected. Most AI development has focused on English or European languages, and as a result, the vernacular languages in India might not get the attention they deserve. Over time, we could see these languages being marginalized in the digital space.
And lastly, big tech platforms like Google and Meta might use AI in ways that diminish the need for people to visit individual news sites. For example, Google’s AI-generated summaries appear at the top of search results. People may read those summaries instead of clicking through to the actual news sites, which could impact the traTic and revenue of publishers. Search traTic is very important for digital publishers, and AIgenerated summaries threaten that.
Another major concern is how quickly bad actors can use AI to spread disinformation. With tools like AI, creating viral misinformation will be easier than ever before. AI can help create deepfakes and clone voices, making it harder to distinguish between real and fake content. We’re already seeing AI being used in scams, and this trend is only going to grow."
Ritu Kapur is the Co-founder and CEO of Quint Digital Media Limited which runs The Quint, an independent news site in India. She has strived to provide multiple platforms for free speech like The Quint’s citizen journalism initiative “My Report”, “Talking Stalking” – a campaign to change the laws to make stalking a non-bailable offence and Webqoof, The Quint’s fact check initiative.
Ritu spent over two decades in broadcast as the founder of Network 18 where she won awards for a docudrama series “Bhanwar” and for The Citizen Journalist show among others.
This interview is part of PANTA Experts where we interview diverse experts in the media industry and beyond. Interviewer: Jan Kersling (PANTA RHAI).
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