Writes Arhs, LUDCI.eu Editorial team
Newspapers and television stations across the world use artificial intelligence to determine story ideas and even write copy, but its uses in investigative journalism could revolutionise the medium. Investigative journalism is far different than standard journalism.
A single-story can take months or years to develop as reporters gather and sift through data to find the information they’re looking for. Artificial intelligence can support investigative journalism to help create stories faster and more in-depth.
“We ended up using it to identify loan agreements in the 13.4 million records of the Paradise Papers. Machine learning helped us identify a specific type of document that was interesting to follow the money, which was loan agreements tied to a big corporation,” research editor and Latin American coordinator for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Emilia-Diaz Struck said in an interview with the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Indeed, AI makes gathering Information faster. For many investigative journalists, the most difficult and painstaking task is information gathering and analysis. In the era before computers, they would sift through boxes filled with paperwork, looking for that one nugget they need.
Computers made that job easier, but it was not until AI evolved to the point where it could gather and sift through the data in hours instead of weeks or months that it truly became a tool for investigative journalism.
It can also fuse databases so companies that show up in multiple databases can be searched quickly. According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, this type of use is called record linkage and is perfect for machine learning.
This is why despite that AI is constantly evolving and becoming more complex, it is already been used in some of the biggest investigative stories of the last few years.
One of the most famous cases is the Panama Papers, where more than 11 million files were leaked from a large offshore law firm. Journalists used AI to quickly comb through the files for important names, etc. They were able to discover the many ways people of affluence were able to avoid taxes by using offshore accounts. The leak named world leaders, celebrities, and more who whether knowingly or unknowingly used these tax havens, according to The Guardian.
AI was used to identify loan agreements from more than 13 million records of the Paradise Paper and identified U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports to discover deaths caused by faulty medical equipment in the Implant Files.
AI and Investigative journalism is the perfect combination. As most of the world’s records are now digital, AI can be a tremendous resource to help investigative reports develop stories faster, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.
“I think will see more and more AI-powered tools that journalists will be able to use without the need for coding skills. I would monitor closely any new tool developments that involve and integrate AI to allow journalists to explore data more efficiently, Diaz-Struck told the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Conclusion:
While AI can’t find the story that’ inside the terabytes of data available, that’s still a job for humans, it can help decipher the data to find the links. The goal is for more journalists throughout the world to have access to this type of science for their own investigative planning, writing and publishing.
