AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.

“We can be open to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence at all points in our value chain, instead of closing ourselves off and assuming the future will look just like today.”

Algorithmic fact checking will go mainstream in 2023.

Teams of computer scientists around the globe have already developed AI systems designed to detect manipulated media, misinformation or fake news.

Some types of verification are well-suited to a high-tech approach: A team from Drexel Univeristy recently published a new approach for detecting forged and manipulated videos. Their system combines forensic analysis with deep learning to detect fake videos that would slip past human reviewers or existing systems.

But fact-checking isn’t usually so straightforward. A quote might be accurate, but misleading. Every news story is built on a subjective frame of what’s included — or excluded. That nuance, however, is lost when researchers test a new AI model against benchmark datasets that catalog posts as true or false.

The researchers who are developing cutting edge AI fact-checking systems today measure their accuracy to the hundredth of a percent against benchmark datasets of social media posts and articles. That’s the standard way for artificial intelligence researchers to test and share their results, but it’s not well-suited to supporting journalists on deadline or platforms that need to make moderation decisions at scale.

The teams building these tools are well-intentioned, but their work risks being a high-tech Maginot Line: A defense against misleading COVID tweets from 2020 that can’t anticipate — or respond to — the next iteration of information warfare.

The challenge for journalists, however, will be if these tools are widely adopted by social media platforms, ISPs, or content-managment systems. Fake and misleading stories might still circulate because bad actors would have the resources to engineer ways around the automated tools. Reporters, on the other hand, might find their work blocked as investigations and enterprise reporting lack the precedent in the AI’s model to appear “true.”

But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Journalists can engage with the technologists who are working in this space to improve — and direct — their work. As an industry we can wrestle with the ethics of letting machines audit and improve our reporting. We can be open to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence at all points in our value chain, instead of closing ourselves off and assuming the future will look just like today.

If we spend 2023 waiting for the killer AI app that will save journalism, we won’t like the results. We’ll wind up playing catch-up, as we have with each wave of technological disruption for the last two decades.

But if we use the coming year to act — by tracking the technologies that will shape our industry, by building partnerships that equip our organizations to grow, by taking stock of the skills we need in the newsroom — we can have agency over our future.

We can create a future where AI is a tool for making journalism more sustainable instead of inhabiting a future created by others

Sam Guzik leads product strategy for WNYC and is a foresight expert advisor at the Future Today Institute.

Algorithmic fact checking will go mainstream in 2023.

Teams of computer scientists around the globe have already developed AI systems designed to detect manipulated media, misinformation or fake news.

Some types of verification are well-suited to a high-tech approach: A team from Drexel Univeristy recently published a new approach for detecting forged and manipulated videos. Their system combines forensic analysis with deep learning to detect fake videos that would slip past human reviewers or existing systems.

But fact-checking isn’t usually so straightforward. A quote might be accurate, but misleading. Every news story is built on a subjective frame of what’s included — or excluded. That nuance, however, is lost when researchers test a new AI model against benchmark datasets that catalog posts as true or false.

The researchers who are developing cutting edge AI fact-checking systems today measure their accuracy to the hundredth of a percent against benchmark datasets of social media posts and articles. That’s the standard way for artificial intelligence researchers to test and share their results, but it’s not well-suited to supporting journalists on deadline or platforms that need to make moderation decisions at scale.

The teams building these tools are well-intentioned, but their work risks being a high-tech Maginot Line: A defense against misleading COVID tweets from 2020 that can’t anticipate — or respond to — the next iteration of information warfare.

The challenge for journalists, however, will be if these tools are widely adopted by social media platforms, ISPs, or content-managment systems. Fake and misleading stories might still circulate because bad actors would have the resources to engineer ways around the automated tools. Reporters, on the other hand, might find their work blocked as investigations and enterprise reporting lack the precedent in the AI’s model to appear “true.”

But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Journalists can engage with the technologists who are working in this space to improve — and direct — their work. As an industry we can wrestle with the ethics of letting machines audit and improve our reporting. We can be open to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence at all points in our value chain, instead of closing ourselves off and assuming the future will look just like today.

If we spend 2023 waiting for the killer AI app that will save journalism, we won’t like the results. We’ll wind up playing catch-up, as we have with each wave of technological disruption for the last two decades.

But if we use the coming year to act — by tracking the technologies that will shape our industry, by building partnerships that equip our organizations to grow, by taking stock of the skills we need in the newsroom — we can have agency over our future.

We can create a future where AI is a tool for making journalism more sustainable instead of inhabiting a future created by others

Sam Guzik leads product strategy for WNYC and is a foresight expert advisor at the Future Today Institute.

Gina Chua   The traditional story structure gets deconstructed

Pia Frey   Publishers start polling their users at scale

Mariana Moura Santos   A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world

Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni   The future of journalism is not you

Mauricio Cabrera   It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities

Dana Lacey   Tech will screw publishers over

Burt Herman   The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning

Sarah Alvarez   Dream bigger or lose out

Gordon Crovitz   The year advertisers stop funding misinformation

Francesco Zaffarano   There is no end of “social media”

Paul Cheung   More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

Leezel Tanglao   Community partnerships drive better reporting

A.J. Bauer   Covering the right wrong

Matt Rasnic   More newsroom workers turn to organized labor

Hillary Frey   Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires

Alex Sujong Laughlin   Credit where it’s due

Anthony Nadler   Confronting media gerrymandering

Doris Truong   Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth

An Xiao Mina   Journalism in a time of permacrisis

Juleyka Lantigua   Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine

John Davidow   A year of intergenerational learning

Snigdha Sur   Newsrooms get nimble in a recession

Daniel Trielli   Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.

Cassandra Etienne   Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities

Laura E. Davis   The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves

Emma Carew Grovum   The year to resist forgetting about diversity

Zizi Papacharissi   Platforms are over

Ryan Gantz   “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”

Esther Kezia Thorpe   Subscription pressures force product innovation

Ariel Zirulnick   Journalism doubles down on user needs

Susan Chira   Equipping local journalism

Alan Henry   A reckoning with why trust in news is so low

Ayala Panievsky   It’s time for PR for journalism

Johannes Klingebiel   The innovation team, R.I.P.

Andrew Donohue   We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy

Surya Mattu   Data journalists learn from photojournalists

Michael W. Wagner   The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-check (no, really!)

Shanté Cosme   The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Mission-driven metrics become our North Star

Bill Grueskin   Local news will come to rely on AI

Jim Friedlich   Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage

Jim VandeHei   There is no “peak newsletter”

Sue Schardt   Toward a new poetics of journalism

Walter Frick   Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets

Emily Nonko   Incarcerated reporters get more bylines

Jaden Amos   TikTok personality journalists continue to rise

Ryan Nave   Citizen journalism, but make it equitable

Kavya Sukumar   Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale

Jenna Weiss-Berman   The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)

Stefanie Murray   The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy

Peter Bale   Rising costs force more digital innovation

Delano Massey   The industry shakes its imposter syndrome

Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles   DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse

Gabe Schneider   Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay

Raney Aronson-Rath   Journalists will band together to fight intimidation

Sarah Stonbely   Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels

Simon Galperin   Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media

Andrew Losowsky   Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter

Anna Nirmala   News organizations get new structures

Laxmi Parthasarathy   Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism

Joni Deutsch   Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence

Josh Schwartz   The AI spammers are coming

Nicholas Thompson   The year AI actually changes the media business

Sarabeth Berman   Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale

Lisa Heyamoto   The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability

Alex Perry   New paths to transparency without Twitter

Eric Ulken   Generative AI brings wrongness at scale

Brian Moritz   Rebuilding the news bundle

Taylor Lorenz   The “creator economy” will be astroturfed

Kaitlyn Wells   We’ll prioritize media literacy for children

Brian Stelter   Finding new ways to reach news avoiders

Victor Pickard   The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce

Barbara Raab   More journalism funders will take more risks

Alexandra Svokos   Working harder to reach audiences where they are

Kathy Lu   We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders

Larry Ryckman   We’ll work together with our competitors

Upasna Gautam   Technology that performs at the speed of news

Jesse Holcomb   Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled

Ryan Kellett   Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers

Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson   News product goes from trend to standard

Rodney Gibbs   Recalibrating how we work apart

Janelle Salanga   Journalists work from a place of harm reduction

Tre'vell Anderson   Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns

Anika Anand   Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures

David Skok   Renewed interest in human-powered reporting

Sumi Aggarwal   Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development

Karina Montoya   More reporters on the antitrust beat

Rachel Glickhouse   Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor

Sarah Marshall   A web channel strategy won’t be enough

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Journalism education faces a crossroads

Kirstin McCudden   We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering

Khushbu Shah   Global reporting will suffer

Cory Bergman   The AI content flood

Sam Gregory   Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made

Jessica Clark   Open discourse retrenches

Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson   Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs

Anita Varma   Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival

Eric Thurm   Journalists think of themselves as workers

Ståle Grut   Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too

Cindy Royal   Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…

Michael Schudson   Journalism gets more and more difficult

Tim Carmody   Newsletter writers need a new ethics

Jarrad Henderson   Video editing will help people understand the media they consume

Martina Efeyini   Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.

Basile Simon   Towards supporting criminal accountability

Eric Holthaus   As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power

J. Siguru Wahutu   American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies

David Cohn   AI made this prediction

Tamar Charney   Flux is the new stability

Eric Nuzum   A focus on people instead of power

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism

Sue Robinson   Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   More of the same

Al Lucca   Digital news design gets interesting again

Kerri Hoffman   Podcasting goes local

Elite Truong   In platform collapse, an opportunity for community

Joshua P. Darr   Local to live, wire to wither

Dominic-Madori Davis   Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting

Priyanjana Bengani   Partisan local news networks will collaborate

Mar Cabra   The inevitable mental health revolution

Jessica Maddox   Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture

Alexandra Borchardt   The year of the climate journalism strategy

Wilson Liévano   Diaspora journalism takes the next step

Amethyst J. Davis   The slight of the great contraction

Christina Shih   Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials

Ben Werdmuller   The internet is up for grabs again

Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven   Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism

Julia Beizer   News fatigue shows us a clear path forward

Mario García   More newsrooms go mobile-first

Julia Angwin   Democracies will get serious about saving journalism

Jonas Kaiser   Rejecting the “free speech” frame

Joe Amditis   AI throws a lifeline to local publishers

Richard Tofel   The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates

Masuma Ahuja   Journalism starts working for and with its communities

Janet Haven   ChatGPT and the future of trust 

Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski   News organizations step up their support for caregivers

Nikki Usher   This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)

Parker Molloy   We’ll reach new heights of moral panic

Jacob L. Nelson   Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Journalists productively harness generative AI tools

Joanne McNeil   Facebook and the media kiss and make up

Dannagal G. Young   Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat

Jody Brannon   We’ll embrace policy remedies

Don Day   The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.

Christoph Mergerson   The rot at the core of the news business

Sam Guzik   AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.

Nicholas Jackson   There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work

Kaitlin C. Miller   Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly

Jennifer Brandel   AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more. 

Errin Haines   Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public

S. Mitra Kalita   “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”

Sue Cross   Thinking and acting collectively to save the news

Moreno Cruz Osório   Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action

Mael Vallejo   More threats to press freedom across the Americas

Jakob Moll   Journalism startups will think beyond English

Peter Sterne   AI enters the newsroom