AI, numbers, and the future of media portals

By Rushan Ziatdinov

Recently, I read an interesting and very timely opinion piece titled "Does news media have no future?" published in The Korea Times. I can hardly argue with many of the points made in the article, as they accurately explain the issues involved in being a journalist. If I had not read that article, you would never have read this article, because I would never have written it.

I do not consider myself a journalist, although writing newspaper-style articles is not too difficult for me because I have more advanced experience in writing academic articles. Some of them I edit and strengthen myself 10-20 times before submitting them to an academic journal. The submission of a scientific manuscript is not the end of the story, because if the manuscript is not rejected (which is a high likelihood at prestigious journals), it goes through a thorough peer review process, and the author must diligently edit the manuscript according to the comments of several anonymous reviewers.

Unfortunately, in the world of capitalism, things are random. Companies, markets and industries can appear, develop rapidly, deteriorate or disappear. As far as we use numbers and use rankings, there will always be some attractive and not-so-attractive areas for work, because people compare numbers (rankings, salaries and other benefits) rather than making deep analysis of compared sectors. The human mind usually looks for a simple explanation to a problem. In the first place, this problem is in our minds, and it is a result of the way in which we use numbers. If a soccer team is at the bottom of a championship table, most people are going to see that team as a loser. How long will people use that kind of thinking? Can't there exist a society where everyone is a winner?

In human resource management, jobs are compared based on job analysis for the purpose of determining salaries and various payments. As a result, some jobs are valued more and others less, and such an approach seems to be common nowadays. Also, there are different methods of job analysis that can lead to different rankings of jobs. These methods create inequality between different jobs. I am not saying that quality or high-caliber jobs should not be highly valued, just that in the modern capitalist world, inequality, which is the result of calculations using numbers, has become widespread. That is why journalists can move to the entertainment industry, where they can probably get a higher salary and better working conditions.

Numbers stress people out. People count their age, salary, blood pressure, money left in their bank accounts, and some count the number of years they have left to live. Numbers have infiltrated the social sciences and are used to calculate things like happiness levels. Many modern surveys use a popular Likert scale, where numbers from 1 to 5 can be used. Why only whole numbers? Is there a mathematical proof that only whole numbers can be used in surveys? Of course, whole numbers are easy. But from a computational point of view, even the radicals of whole numbers, such as the square root, the cube root and the nth root, are not complex.

Advances in mathematics and engineering have brought us to the fields of artificial intelligence, data science, robotics and a few others, which is why a lot of jobs are on the verge of disappearing. However, many of these jobs are made up of repetitive tasks that can be done better by a machine than a human being. There is a need to create jobs that are more creative and more intelligent for human beings, that will make them happier and more prosperous, and that will improve their overall well-being.

The author of the article I mentioned in the first paragraph correctly writes that AI can summarize existing texts. And even if it does it in an excellent way, it can't create news that happened, for example, an hour ago, without using someone's texts. Basically, there could be a completely AI-written media portal, but it will be based on other existing news and texts. Actually, it's not a bad idea to have such a portal in Korea, where, for example, only positive news from about 200 countries could be aggregated and fully translated by AI into both Korean and English, as this could help bring new ideas to the country. At the same time, this could create a lot of jobs for those who are good at proofreading texts, as automated translations are not always excellent, or enhancing the literary value of texts.

The world is indeed changing rapidly. In the Fifth Industrial Revolution, humans will need to harmoniously cooperate and coexist with machines, not compete with them. Actually, it is not wise to compete with a machine or a robot in a task that it is excellent at. That will make human beings the loser. Similarly, it would be hard for machines to compete with us in creativity, innovation, emotional intelligence and the ability to draw from diverse experiences and perspectives that humans possess. That is why businesses need to give serious consideration to how they can create new, more intelligent and creative jobs for people. The human race needs to move on to the next stage of its evolution.

AI itself cannot easily replace creative people, but creative people can be replaced by other more creative people using AI. AI can enhance the capabilities of creative people, allowing them to collaborate with AI tools to achieve even greater levels of creativity and innovation. For media portals, this can lead to better-quality content and news of higher value, resulting in increased reader interest.

AI can help media portals personalize content. AI algorithms can recommend personalized content by analyzing user preferences and behaviors. This will keep readers more engaged, increase retention rates and ensure that they are seeing content that is relevant to their interests. AI can also help media portals be more efficient in their curation and organization of content. Automating content tagging, metadata generation and categorizing will make it easier for users to find what they're looking for.

While journalists focus on more creative and innovative content, AI tools can generate various reports, historical overviews or books based on content written by journalists. This can save time and resources for media organizations and complement human-generated content. Texts that have been published in a newspaper for years can become an encyclopedia, where readers can search for questions and answers. Similar technologies already exist, and a good example is the website ChatPDF.com.

AI itself can help to promote the articles of journalists, as it can be used to analyze data in real time and provide breaking news, market trends and live coverage of events. It can also be used to analyze what's trending and being commented on in social media, as long as it's legal to do so. This can help media organizations understand how the public reacts to various issues and adjust how they report accordingly.

By making content available in a variety of languages, AI-powered language translation services can make it easier to reach a global audience. Can you imagine a major Korean newspaper like Hankyoreh, The Hankook Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo, Dong-A Ilbo, Chosun Ilbo and others translating all their content from Korean to English? Won't this help promote Korea and related things worldwide? It will also be very useful for the more than 1 million foreigners living in Korea.

With the help of AI, media portals can predict user behavior, trends and content performance. Editorial decisions and content strategies can be based on this information. AI can handle routine tasks like entering data, distributing content and posting to social media, freeing human resources for more creative and strategic work. AI can enable interactive elements within articles and videos, helping to keep users engaged. For example, interactive infographics, polls and chatbots can be used to provide additional value to readers. AI-powered portal search engines can deliver more accurate results of journalists' creative work, with more sophisticated search capabilities such as image and voice search.

Rushan Ziatdinov (www.ziatdinov-lab.com) is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Keimyung University in Daegu.