News industry can’t meet AI threat alone, says ITN boss

Broadcasters, journalists and producers cannot be solely responsible for tackling the spread of AI-generated disinformation, the chief executive of ITN has said.  

Speaking at a Rory Peck Trust event for World Press Freedom Day at the US embassy in central London yesterday, Rachel Corp said government and big tech companies need to play a larger part in attempting to mitigate the impact of AI on the news industry.  

In June last year Corp wrote to Chloe Smith, then secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, requesting that the government take steps to consider and address the issue, particularly in the face of the elections due to take place this year.  

At yesterday’s event she suggested that relatively little progress had been made with government following the letter, saying: “I’m not sure how much further we’ve progressed in working out what to do about it – but at least the conversation’s being had with government, with media more widely in broadcast as well as print.” 

She said ITN, which produces daily news programmes for Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV, was continuing to raise the issue with government and Ofcom. 

But she went on: “We don’t think we should have to work it out on our own. We’re all tackling mis and disinformation constantly, we all have factchecking and dedicated correspondents, we’re all wading through it, but as this content grows, it can’t be left to us to solely be the ones who sort out ‘this is fake’ and ‘this isn’t’ – we need to be doing our eyewitness journalism, we need to be doing our original journalism. 

“So others need to come in, that’s what we’re challenging gov and big tech on – this is for all of us to work out.” 

She added that so-called deep fakes – AI-generated or manipulated images or video which are indistinguishable from real ones – were not the only issue of concern for news media.  

“We should worry about shallow fakes as well,” she said, arguing that even if an audience is presented with information which is easily identifiable as fake, the sheer volume of such misinformation available will create a situation where they do not trust anything they are presented with.  

Corp added: “There is this feeling that we have something very precious in this country with our journalism, particularly with our regulated broadcast journalism, and that’s worth holding on to, particularly in public service broadcasting because it’s all about our audiences being able to find that trusted content.  

“So its about making sure that any regulation – the Media Bill and Ofcom and any future regulation highlight the prominence of that sort of content so that people can still find it.”