How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype
«“I would put media reporting [about AI] at around two out of 10,” David Reid, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Liverpool Hope University, said to the BBC earlier this year. “When the media talks about AI, they think of it as a single entity. It is not. What I would like to see is more nuanced reporting.”
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Some working in the technology industry may feel very put upon – a few years ago Zachary Lipton, then an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, was quoted in the Guardian calling media coverage of artificial intelligence “sensationalised crap” and likening it to an “AI misinformation epidemic”. In private conversations, many computer scientists and technologists working in the private sector echo his complaints, decrying what several describe as relentlessly negative coverage obsessed with “killer robots.”
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In her work on what she calls the “AI panic”, she writes about journalism that tends to foreground claims about the possible extinction-risk that could arise from AI in the future while, effectively, diverting attention away from current, real-world problems ranging from discrimination and inequality to the environmental impact of energy- and water-hungry technologies.
More broadly, several pieces of research on media coverage of AI suggest that overall, news coverage is anything but dominated by negative angles and critical voices. Instead, overall, it comes off as industry-led and generally positive, even uncritical.
[…] the same team of authors suggested that AI coverage in the UK tended to “construct the expectation of a pseudo-artificial general intelligence: a collective of technologies capable of solving nearly any problem”.
A team of researchers found a very similar situation in Canada. In their report, they wrote that, whatever those at the receiving end may feel, in fact, “tech news tends to be techno-optimistic”, and AI is generally covered more as business news than as science and technology. Overall, they find, “very few critical voices are heard in legacy media” in Canada.
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There are some really good reporters doing important work to help people understand AI—as well as plenty of sensationalist coverage focused on killer robots and wild claims about possible future existential risks.
But, more than anything, research on how news media cover AI overall suggests that Gebru is largely right – the coverage tends to be led by industry sources, and often takes claims about what the technology can and can’t do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contributes to the hype cycle.»