The declining level of trust in journalism and, consequently, the declining level of civic engagement has a direct negative impact on participatory democracy. Critics argue that journalism has failed to encourage citizens to be more actively involved in civic and political activities, including voting, working as a volunteer, donating money to charitable organizations, and participating in political and civic campaigns at the local, state and national levels.
To address this threat to democracy, I began to explore what AI can do to bolster democracy through a journalism perspective. The fundamental question to address is how emerging technology, especially artificial intelligence, can increase the level of trust in journalism and boost civic engagement. My primary focus is the degree to which average citizens consume different types of news and engage in political conversation, and how news consumption and conversation can lead to civic and political participation.
My research has confirmed that the more citizens consume information and news about public affairs and community issues and the more they engage in political conversation, the higher level of trust in news, in journalism and in professional journalists. That, in turn, does lead to higher levels of civic engagement.
For the past 18 months, I have led a team of researchers in the building of an AI-empowered, non-profit news platform that is citizen and community focused. Using AI technologies, such as ChatGPT 4.0 and DALL E 3, we are able to generate automated news content, including text and visuals. In doing so, we shed a particular light on local nonprofit and voluntary organizations, as well as marginalized communities, that are more often than not underserved by mainstream news organizations.
In the first quarter of 2024, we launched our AI news platform in Miami. We are conducting, initially, an experimental community-intervention study with students from Florida International University to test how our AI news platform works in terms of leveraging the level of trust in human-generated and AI-generated news content and how the level of trust in news leads to civic engagement.
For the news platform, which we are calling My Miami News, we have trained ChatGPT 4.0 and DALL E 3 to generate news stories. For this community intervention project, we selected 40 nonprofit organizations in Miami and adjacent communities and focused on search topics in eight broad categories, including environment, homeless and housing, immigration, animals, children and youth, and nonprofit organizations focused on marginalized communities. The news content includes basic profiles, introductory news stories about those organizations, and news stories about a wide variety of activities, services, and volunteer and giving opportunities.
From this study, we will better understand how an AI news platform fits in a community’s news and information ecosystem and its impact on various communities. We will also explore expanding the platform to other communities around Florida and beyond.
