麻豆淫院

The hype surrounding artificial intelligence is more than just superficial excitement鈥攊t is reorganizing how journalism operates, from newsroom priorities to public perceptions of the news, according to a new in Digital Journalism co-authored by a University of Massachusetts Amherst journalism scholar.

"Hype is about more than just possibilities or disappointment," explains Rodrigo Zamith, associate professor and chair of journalism at UMass Amherst. "It directs our attention and our resources, and what people and organizations choose to mobilize around."

Newsrooms have raced to form AI partnerships with technology companies or find ways to integrate AI technologies into their work, while labor unions and professional societies have sought to develop protections against what they see as unethical uses of the technology.

At the same time, journalists themselves are grappling with questions about what skills remain uniquely human as AI tools become more advanced. This is part of what Zamith has previously called .

Zamith, Seth C. Lewis of the University of Oregon and Jon Benedik A. Bunquin of the University of the Philippines created a first-of-its-kind matrix to explain how technological hype produces both symbolic and material effects for news outlets and their journalists. Their article breaks out the hype into five categories:

1. Attentional hype creates the impression that something is especially important and merits serious consideration, with some journalists and news organizations seizing on opportunities to appear forward-thinking or as defenders of traditions.
2. Orientational hype directs that attention toward specific objectives, products and ways of doing things, often by reallocating scarce newsroom resources.
3. Signaling hype shapes how journalists and organizations portray technologies like AI to the public via their reporting and their own use of AI through strategic messaging, sometimes reinforcing narratives of innovation and inevitability.
4. Mobilizing hype drives partnerships, policies and collective action, including professional codes of ethics, deals with AI providers and union-led protections against misuses of AI.
5. Reflexive hype forces journalists to reconsider their roles, values and professional identities, such as when generative AI takes on increasingly complex and creative tasks once reserved for humans.

Internally, hype affects how journalists and editors make decisions about staffing and resources. Externally, it influences how the public and policymakers perceive the role of AI in media.

Zamith points out that the impact is particularly notable in an industry already facing economic pressures.

"Journalism is an industry that is now constantly being challenged to do more with less," he says. "When journalists and their managers start talking about where to invest their limited resources, hype around AI plays a really big role."

While he believes there will always be a role for human journalists in identifying story ideas, cultivating inside sources, knocking on doors and fact-checking, Zamith notes that AI has and will continue to supplant humans for other tasks.

This includes copyediting, transcribing interviews and summarizing public meetings, tagging multimedia content and rapidly creating derivative content at scale, such as translated or social media-adapted versions of original news stories.

"When we're talking about hype, many people think AI is the future of journalism," he says. "I think AI is already the present of journalism."

The researchers assert that hype, while often exaggerated, should not be ignored. Instead, it should be understood as a signal of broader cultural and institutional change.

"Hype brings up possibilities for the future," Zamith adds. "We need to focus on which possibilities we want to incentivize, and then on how we can incentivize them. For example, how can we incentivize AI that better serves democracy?"