Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The Me­dia In­sti­tute of the Caribbean (MIC) says there is an ur­gent need to ad­dress the trans­for­ma­tive im­pact of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) on jour­nal­ism. In its World Press Free­dom Day mes­sage, MIC em­pha­sised the Caribbean’s unique chal­lenges of me­dia vi­a­bil­i­ty, mis­in­for­ma­tion, and nat­ur­al dis­as­ters in the face of AI.

World Press Free­dom Day was pro­claimed by the UN Gen­er­al As­sem­bly in De­cem­ber 1993, fol­low­ing the rec­om­men­da­tion of UN­ESCO’s Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence. Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions, “May 3 acts as a re­minder to gov­ern­ments of the need to re­spect their com­mit­ment to press free­dom. It is al­so a day of re­flec­tion among me­dia pro­fes­sion­als about is­sues of press free­dom and pro­fes­sion­al ethics.”

In the Caribbean, the high­est-ranked coun­try on the World Press Free­dom In­dex is Trinidad & To­ba­go, at 19, climb­ing 6 lev­els from the pre­vi­ous year. This is ac­cord­ing to a re­port re­leased by Re­porters With­out Bor­ders.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion said Caribbean me­dia should ad­vo­cate for re­gion­al poli­cies to tax tech gi­ants and rein­vest pro­ceeds in­to jour­nal­ism.

“There is al­so an ur­gent need to ex­plore AI-dri­ven rev­enue mod­els, such as per­son­alised sub­scrip­tions and au­to­mat­ed ad place­ment,” MIC stat­ed.

Un­der the glob­al theme “Re­port­ing in the Brave New World—The Im­pact of Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence on Press Free­dom and the Me­dia”, the MIC made a call for re­gion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion to har­ness AI’s po­ten­tial while safe­guard­ing de­mo­c­ra­t­ic dis­course.

AI is re­shap­ing jour­nal­ism glob­al­ly, but its im­pli­ca­tions are acute in the Caribbean, where me­dia ecosys­tems face struc­tur­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

“While AI tools of­fer op­por­tu­ni­ties for au­to­mat­ed re­port­ing, da­ta analy­sis, and au­di­ence en­gage­ment, they al­so risk deep­en­ing ex­ist­ing in­equities,” a state­ment said yes­ter­day. MIC stat­ed that Caribbean news­rooms are al­ready strained by shrink­ing ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enues.

While the T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA) said there are ben­e­fits to AI use in news­rooms, “prac­ti­tion­ers do need to en­sure they are well in­formed of the va­garies of this lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy so that us­ing AI does not cause de­vi­a­tion from the un­shake­able task of in­form­ing the pub­lic we serve.”

The TTP­BA said free­dom of ex­pres­sion, across all me­dia and in­clud­ing the per­va­sive dig­i­tal plat­forms, was a crit­i­cal el­e­ment in the func­tion­ing and preser­va­tion of de­mo­c­ra­t­ic in­sti­tu­tions.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, the TTP­BA said, “The chal­lenges faced by jour­nal­ists and me­dia hous­es over the last five years with the neb­u­lous but de­cep­tive­ly dan­ger­ous term ‘fake news’ have be­come, with AI, even more pro­nounced.

“The cre­ation of im­ages re­sem­bling and speak­ing like the re­al live per­sons is tru­ly dis­rup­tive, with the po­ten­tial to cre­ate hav­oc in so­ci­eties.”