Bloomberg’s Micklethwait on how AI will change journalism

Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait writes about how artificial intelligence will change journalism.

Micklethwait writes, “But I will submit that our newsroom at Bloomberg is quite a good laboratory to look for clues as to how this revolution might progress. Partly because we use more technology, including early versions of AI, than anywhere else. Out of the 5,000 stories we produce every day there is some form of automation in more than a third of them. And partly because our audience is close to the demanding news consumer of the future. Our readers will trade millions of dollars on the basis of what we write. So accuracy and lack of bias is key for them, but so is time. Our readers, viewers and listeners hate it when we waste their time — and as we shall see, saving time is a key part of what AI offers.

“Here are two examples of what AI can already do.

“The first is a report we published which showed how oil is being smuggled out of Iran and transferred from ship to ship. Those involved go to all sorts of lengths to avoid being caught doing this — so we built an algorithm that looked at satellite images of ships to detect when two vessels were next to each other. On the 566 days when skies were clear between early January 2020 and Oct. 4, 2024, we found 2,006 of these suspicious side-by-side formations — which our journalists could then investigate.”

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