Dr. Mohamed Abdulzaher
By: Dr. Mohamed Abdulzaher
The Artificial Intelligence Journalism era offers humanity new opportunities and challenges to build and adapt new skills. Whilst, the hard skills have been mastered, there is an imperative for Media Communicators to acquire and practice “digitization of soft skills”. These digital soft-skills enable communicator to leverage of Fourth Industrial Technologies to democratise their unique message.
We have upgraded and digitised our hard-skills through technologies that enable the media industry to search, create, distribute, and measure communication effectively. The future of Artificial Intelligence Journalism and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies offer us, as individuals and as a collective humanity, an opportunity and challenge to digitise our soft skills, in the way we priorities, communicate, and empathise our messages.
Also, Artificial Intelligence Journalism will provide us an opportunity and challenge, to democratise the role of communicator – where, everyone and anyone, can translate their messages to a global community.
In AI Journalism Media Communicators cannot rely on the old ways to secure information, or to ignore all the new 4IR tools such as: “Robots, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Virtual Reality, Open Data platforms, Big Data, Blockchained of News, Robotization of Marketing, 3D Printing “and other new technologies provided by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Five years from now, over one-third of skills (35%) that are considered important in today’s workforce will have changed. In this year, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought us advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics. These developments will transform the way we live, and the way we work. Some jobs will disappear, others will grow and jobs that don’t even exist today will become commonplace. What is certain is that the future workforce will need to align its skillset to keep pace, according to WAF report (Alex Gray, The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution).
AI Journalism and Virtual reality
For example, Virtual reality technologies can be used extensively in Artificial Intelligence Journalism to allow AI Journalism Media Communicators to know more accurately about the target audience, and can visualize the imaginations and the expected behaviors towards goods or services, which greatly enhances creating of the best marketing strategies adapting with the Robotization of Marketing.
The concept of applying Virtual Reality to news and video-related content, which will enhance the quality of this kind of content and make it easier to reach to the target audience, where we can create a 3D video news characters, and it will allows interaction between the real world and fictional characters.
According to the report, the global augmented and Virtual Reality market generated $11.32 billion in 2017, and is expected to reach $571.42 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 63.3% from 2018 to 2025. The report provides detailed analyses of the top winning strategies, market share & estimations, driving factors & opportunities, key market segments, and competitive landscape.
Virtual reality news story can be attractive to the main target audience, especially in the future challenges which facing the world. For example; if we have Virtual reality feature about the risks of climate change to the environment and people in the year 2030, where we can show some of the danger will hit the world in case of global warming, extreme weather, bumper crops and crop failure, and polar cap melting. That will raise the level of awareness, empathy for events occurring in the world and creating an effective feedback.
Media Communicator skills
AI Journalism Media Communicators must have extensive knowledge and experience of :
• Creative writing skills, that are compatible with the new skilled and intelligent audience, who has many options and tools, such as robots or artificial intelligence technologies.
• Continuous talent developments of Media Communicators in selecting the right tools and adapting in a way that suits the target audience and delivering the required content.
• Media big players should provide various training courses on the fourth industrial revolution technologies and how it can be used in design the future of artificial intelligence journalism.
• upgrading new tools for artificial intelligence journalism, and applying them within Media companies and universities.