Robot, Do No Harm: Ethics, Credibility and the Legal Future of Journalism

Technology is evolving, providing humanity with incredible productivity tools like artificial intelligence. Simultaneously, news reporting is evolving, providing readers with more ways to consume the news while finding new ways to write it. Both entities have reached a point where the intersection of journalism and artificial intelligence is at a critical juncture. Newsrooms have employed the use of artificial intelligence for increases in reporting speed and synthesizing large sets of data, and artificial intelligence has proven capable of crafting articles autonomously with high levels of accuracy in a matter of seconds. What has not evolved are the ethics policies of newsrooms to account for these rapid changes and the allowance of machines to work untethered with potentially sensitive or inaccurate information. To this end, newsroom ethics policies as of 2018 were examined as they pertain to the rising prevalence of artificial intelligence. The result is an analysis of the possible future use of artificial intelligence for the news industry and the creation of an ethics field guide that merges current journalistic standards and expectations with technological changes to avoid potential ethical and legal challenges.Master of Arts in Digital Communicatio