Our master class featured brilliant speakers from different corners of the world who are thinking about where we are headed with GenAI so we can use this technology to effectively tackle our challenges. 

One question they sought to answer: In a GenAI era, where content is malleable and shape-shifting, what does the future news experience look like?

Think about this for a moment. Content is no longer constrained by medium or format or language. You can watch a podcast (the biggest podcasting platform in the world right now happens to be YouTube) or read it. You can listen to Swedish news in Arabic. 

All of these are real examples that exist right now, thanks to GenAI. And in the future?

You might encounter a live blog on a Web page that recognises you have been reading about a particular topic for a while now, so the content it presents to you will adapt to ensure you are getting only new information, as suggested by Jason Sheppard, senior product manager of AI at The Telegraph.

Or when you go to a Web page, both the text and the visuals are optimised for you, “a multi-dimensional approach where the visual component and the article content become part of the model’s decision-making to deliver the best order of content,” as Sheppard said.

You could choose to instantly convert a text article, replete with quotes, on the federal government’s changes to tax rates into a calculator that lets you swiftly calculate how your tax liability will change this year, as suggested by Sannuta Raghu at Scroll.in.

You could use a slider to give you the gist of an article in 20 words or in 2,000 words. Or you can be presented with a summary of a few paragraphs of an article and choose to further expand any paragraph, further and further, to get more and more detail, kind of like a hierarchical tree view, as Google Labs creative technologist Kawandeep Virdee showed us.

Maybe you want to get more details on what an image is about. You could use a slider to do that.

Or when you are visiting a particular Web site, you could type questions into a search box and generate a Web page on the fly that answers your specific questions and lets you save your answers.

In other words, content will be dynamic and modular. You can mix and match it any way you want.

A few thought-provoking questions, then: What will the fundamental unit of news be? And as an editor, what level of personalisation are you willing to allow so AI can augment the content or the experience?

One thing is certain: Personalisation really is no longer optional. Many news brands are struggling to reach younger audiences — and these are people who absolutely expect personalisation, as Martin Schori, deputy publisher of Aftonbladet pointed out. He also made the point that news consumers say they don’t want AI, but if you provide them with a quality experience, they will happily engage with it.

The Telegraph’s Sheppard agreed: “I grew up with the dawn of the Internet and having to wait for a family member to finish a phone call before I could go online. The customers of the future will have had these chat experiences from an early age, and there will be a behaviour shift in consumption as people adapt to using AI tools more in their day to day.”

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