AI has infiltrated every industry, and during the recent INMA Africa Media Summit, media companies shared how AI is changing newsrooms and what it means for the future, looking at how news publishers are leveraging the tools, as well at some of AI’s shortcomings and possibilities for the future. 

To illustrate the accessibility of AI tools, INMA Researcher-in-Residence Greg Piechota allowed part of his presentation to be delivered by an AI-generated “assistant.”

Using tools that are readily available, Piechota created the video in less than 15 minutes.

“I used ChatGPT to create the text and asked AI to summarise an encyclopedia article and write it in the style of a Kenyan radio host,” he said. “Then I took this text to another AI that basically created a digital voice with a Kenyan English accent and created an avatar of a person that could basically say the words.”

Finally, he embedded the video into an AI-driven video editor and used existing templates to create a background that looked like a TV news segment. The point, he said, is that AI is here and news media companies need to be looking at how it will affect operations going forward. 

Each of his panel guests added their own experiences and insights with AI.

AI as a marketing tool

Katharina Link, chief executive officer of Pulse Africa in Ghana, explained how the company is using AI to improve its marketing efforts. Pulse Africa was interested in increasing its video output because “we saw that our audience likes what we’re doing, especially in terms of video,” she explained. However, the company was limited by the amount of time staff could devote to video.

By setting a goal of increasing video output by 150%-200%, the staff began looking at what AI tools were available to speed up the process and allow them to increase video production and distribution.

“We wanted to increase video output from two to three videos a day to six to eight,” she clarified. “We did that, and the outcome was actually very, very good.”

Both video views and impressions increased, as did engagement with the platform and the content.

Facebook and Instagram saw an initial jump of numbers, increasing reach by 150% in the first month. In the second month, Instagram saw another 100% increase in visits through video, while Facebook registered a 240% increase.

On TikTok, Pulse Africa is seeing its audience grow in terms of video views and engagement: “We actually only started on TikTok in April and we had some good results,” Link said.

Moving forward, she said Pulse Africa will use AI to increase productivity by incorporating AI into various workflows for content, marketing, video editing, and newsroom operations. All of it is used with a great deal of human guidance, with the teams checking and verifying the information. That responsible use of AI will be critical for success: “I think we’ve seen there’s not really a choice to not do it. So I see this as a long-term goal to really have a policy that guides everyone.”

Investigating stories with AI

At the Premium Times in Nigeria, AI is helping drive investigative journalism, said Mojeed Musikilu, editor-in-chief and chief operating officer. Although the company is early in its AI journey, it has started experimenting with tools to make coverage more accurate and efficient. This includes using AI to record and transcribe meeting notes or using Google Translate on documents in a different language.

“Now we are experimenting with other tools which allow us to write better,” he said. “So on social media posts like Facebook, we are asking our digital strategist to use this more for circulation of our journalism. Just last week we started experimenting with TweetGPT, which allows us to write a tweet better.”

None of these tools, he emphasised, will take the place of humans. They only supplement the work of humans and allow for greater productivity. Its meeting transcription tool, for example, “doesn’t translate accurately, but it will do at least more than 50% of the job for you. So you can then come in and do the proper editing, but it has taken 50% of the labour you will have otherwise have done.”

This allows the staff to concentrate more at meetings rather than be concerned with note taking and provides other efficiencies for the staff: “It helps the newsroom be more efficient,” he said. “When there is technology to help you, why must you insist that you must keep doing things in a manual way? It means that journalists can do a lot more. Rather than conduct an interview and spend hours transcribing the interview, it means the journalist can do two or more interviews.”

Journalists will still do the reporting and legwork and will never be replaced by machines: “The key thing about journalism is that the central work that we do as journalists will continue to be done by us. But of course, the processes can be assisted by AI.”

AI as a tool for engagement

At the Daily Maverick in South Africa, AI is being used for everything from transcriptions and headline suggestions to sourcing documents and visualising data, said Rowan Polovin, head of product and technology. But one of the most effective ways it has used AI is to provide content summaries and personalised recommendations.

The publisher recently introduced a product that is improving engagement by showing readers summaries of content and using AI to share those with readers. When a reader visits the site, they’ll see a summary of stories they can flip through to find what they want to read. Those summaries are written by ChatGPT.

“So instead of someone getting long content, taking a long time, they could get exactly what they’re wanting in a very short space through these summaries,” Polovin said. “We’ve also done bullet points, which are also generated through AI. So you can either get a paragraph summary, you can get a bullet point summary, and if you really want to continue with the experience, you can obviously flip through and read the full content.”

The idea is to not only provide the readers with the stories they’re most interested in, but also to give more choices in how they consume content. However, he noted the importance of having human guidance over the AI.

“This is a principle that applies for many aspects of product design and machine learning and AI,” he said. “We ensure that nothing gets published to the end user until we’ve had an editor or sub-editor actually read it,” Polovin said. When the content is edited or added to the CMS platform, a summary is generated and the editor or the sub-editor will verify the information and make any necessary changes before it is published.

“That sort of reduces the potential risks that could possibly crop in using purely AI to create the content,” he said.

AI: The big picture

Dr. Anderson Uvie-Emegbo, senior executive fellow at China European International Business School in Ghana, weighed in with a CEO’s perspective on AI. While not many news media companies in Africa are dabbling in AI yet, he said they must start using it to make progress.

“We need more media organisations to have a clear strategic intent and a very deliberate process for translating all those new technologies into achieving their business goals. I think that’s the opportunity,” he said.

For many, it is an uphill battle.

“We live in an environment in Africa where the political and regulatory environment is typically hostile to media organisations. We have challenges with our Internet infrastructure. We have a lot of consumers that have low purchasing power. So when you think about subscriptions as a model, it’s a challenge,” he said. They also struggle financially and may have trouble understanding new business models developed for a digital age.

“Many equate adopting technology as the magic wand. But they’ve forgotten that digital transformation is more about the sociology, how people behave, how people interact, and the psychology, which is how people behave and not so much about the technology,” Uvie-Emegbo said. African media companies should focus on creating a culture of experimentation, innovation, open collaboration, and trying new things.

“I think it’s something that we need to build even deeper in the media community here,” he said. “Africa is a very big market, isn’t it? 1.2 billion people. There’s a whole lot that we can do. So I think the opportunity is there, but we need to knock on each other’s doors. We need to learn from each other.”

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