SXSWORLD

SXSW.COM | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 9 | SXS W O R L D 3 1 as many earnings report stories while actually lowering their total error rate. "A human writes a template, and then the structured data gets fed in. If you look at a lot of these stories together, they're all pretty much the same," Broussard says. "It's great because it's really boring to write the same story over and over again, but com- puters are really good at routine tasks that don't change very much." While The Intercept prides itself on pre- serving the privacy of its readers, Fillion notes that other publications and news aggregators could use the sort of data routinely collected by many websites to offer readers incredibly tailored experiences, like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter do already. "Adding that level of personalization in news reporting can help give us an advantage and make news more relevant to people," she says. "You could create 5,000 or 10,000 versions of the same story by plugging in a person's address ... It can be really hyperlocal content." Elsewhere in the newsroom, however, AI is turning journalists into cyborgs by augmenting the ability of investigative reporters and data journalists to find sto- ries. Story discovery engines, like those that Broussard builds, are systems that enable reporters to efficiently parse through reams of data to uncover insights. "What the computer is really good at doing is processing the data and visualizing it in a way that helps you, the investigative reporter, identify what's an anomaly and what's not," Broussard explains. "It could help find out what the next Theranos or Enron is," Fillion adds. AI systems were instrumental to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal. Buzzfeed News used AI to track the paths of spy planes over the United States last year. ProPublica used AI to figure out what indi- vidual U.S. lawmakers were most interested in based on what they talked about more than their colleagues. The limits of how AI systems can be used seem to be constrained only by available data and the imaginations of the journalists designing them. Meredith Broussard and Rubina Fillion will both be a part of the "AI and the Future of Journalism" panel, part of the Media & Journalism Track at SXSW 2019. See schedule.sxsw.com for more details. "What AI is good for is freeing up people who can spend less time focused on mundane tasks a lot of journalists end up doing." Rubina Fillion

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