Africa-Press – Ghana. Mrs Maria Kwami Gwira, a communications strategist and media development advocate has said, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have interconnected humanity with global audiences and supplied greater tools, to enhance the quality of media work.
AI, in addition to its ability to automate and streamline many tasks in newsrooms across the world, it had become a reality, she said.
Despite the efficiency and usefulness of media AI tools, she acknowledged that practitioners must continue to focus on the core functions of journalism including investigations and upholding truth in storytelling.
“This requires the use of all our human senses, as well as instinct, creativity, experience and opportunity, which remain firmly within the realm of human endeavour”.
Mrs Gwira made this exposé in a keynote address at the 2025 World Press Freedom Day celebration for the Volta and Oti regions, in Ho, on the theme: “Reporting in the Brave New World – The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Press Freedom and the Media”.
She noted that the evolution of AI was already having a profound effect on information gathering, processing, and disseminated, with heightened productivity in terms of substance, quality.
Mrs Gwira, a former Director of Public Affairs at the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS), also the Executive Director of Dede Media Foundation, a non-profit focused on media capacity building and civic empowerment, said AI has created endless opportunities for journalism and broadened its frontiers.
“While AI seems to have opened the world of Journalism up to endless possibilities, there are real limitations and shortcomings that ought to be acknowledged by the industry so as to maintain journalistic integrity and accuracy”.
“Ethical considerations and possible legal ramifications regarding bias, transparency, and the potential for AI to replace human judgment need to be carefully weighed. The use of AI in journalism raises many ethical questions, with potential legal fallback,” she added.
Mrs Gwira cautioned against the dangers of uncritical AI adoption, especially as discussions around General AI and Superintelligent systems move from fiction to potential problem-solving reality.
She said the potential of AI to be used as tools for mass public control, social engineering, or other unethical uses could not be overemphasised.
“The potential for these higher levels of AI to affect our social structures, choices, and decision making is a real possibility that should be considered now before it consumes us.
“For now, let us focus on efficiently using available AI systems to improve productivity, save time and resources, and improve the quality of journalism.
“The perfection of our craft through mastery of whichever tools we have access to, will be key to our control and proper usage of more advanced systems that cannot properly serve us if we carelessly supply flawed, ambiguous, or biased prompts,” she added.
She enumerated types of AI as Narrow AI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), Reactive machines, Limited Memory AI, Theory of Mind AI and Self-Aware AI, currently on the market or soon to be.
Mrs Gwira acknowledged that despite these advancements, using generative AI to create source content is particularly problematic in societies that are already underrepresented in existing datasets, stating that “to generate unbiased content, narrow AI requires huge amounts of high-quality, unbiased data and if the data is flawed, so will the output”.
She identified that generating a prompt to source historical background information for an article on “Anloga” or the “Anlo” state of Ghana may elicit little or no information, and the likelihood of the query returning inaccurate information pertaining to the nation of “Angola” or the “Anglo-Saxons”, which are real difficulties.
Mrs Gwira also said the global space was witnessing bold and massive erasure of certain historical data and stories, painstakingly gathered over many decades, from US-government controlled websites, which were once taken for granted as a sure source of historical reference material.
She indicated these excesses might create a gap in information pertaining to specific demographics, resulting in skewed and inaccurate results in any queries that rely on such content as source material.
“Generative AI could sometimes elicit ‘hallucinations’ or fabricate little details or even extensive facts that serve to compromise the accuracy of the content generated.
“Constant human oversight is crucial to ensure accuracy. Journalists must carefully review AI-generated content, ensuring that prompts are precise, and outputs align with journalistic standards with social and cultural context,” she added.
She identified intellectual property disputes, data privacy concerns, transparency and explainability requirements as well as combating AI biases and discriminations as prevalent AI legal issues to be considered seriously.
She advocated that journos could use AI Chatbots to facilitate personalised content delivery, interactive storytelling, enhanced reader interaction, data-driven insights and efficiency in content dissemination, while taking advantage of AI tasks, including perception, language understanding, learning and problem-solving tools.
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