Author: T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

You wouldn’t usually associate Pikachu with protest. But a figure dressed as the iconic yellow Pokémon joined a protest last week in Turkey to demonstrate against the country’s authoritarian leader. And then a virtual doppelgänger made the rounds on social media, raising doubt in people’s minds about whether what they were seeing was true. (Just to be clear, the image in the post shown below is very much fake.) This is the latest in a spate of incidents involving AI-generated (or AI-edited) images that can be made easily and cheaply and that are often posted during breaking news events. Doctored,…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off at lightning speed in the past couple of years, creating disruption in many industries. Newsrooms are no exception. A new report published today finds that news audiences and journalists alike are concerned about how news organisations are – and could be – using generative AI such as chatbots, image, audio and video generators, and similar tools. The report draws on three years of interviews and focus group research into generative AI and journalism in Australia and six other countries (United States, United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and France). Only 25% of our news…