Urvashi Aneja is the founder and head of Digital Futures Lab, a Goa-based think tank dedicated to building ‘‘futures where technology serves everyone, not just a few’’. In this interview, she outlines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the dissemination of information in India, highlighting both its potential and its pitfalls.
Figures show that there is a strong attraction for AI news in India. Which opportunities does AI present for the dissemination of information in this country?
Urvashi Aneja: One big opportuny is around linguistic diversity. These tools offer the ability for people who don’t speak the dominant languages to access news in their local language and that’s a big thing because India has more than 200 languages. Nonetheless, we’re still far from these tools actually being able to perform well in all those languages. Another aspect is from a literacy perspective: you have low levels of literacy for a large part of the population in India. And the fact that you can now access these tools with multimodal formats means that there are new opportunities for people to participate in the information ecosystem, even while they may not have classic literacy. Both as listeners or viewers, and also as people who can produce news content in different formats. Third, AI also brings down the cost of news production. You don’t necessarily need a big studio or a lot of people any more. Just a single person can shoot the story, record the interviews, edit it and publish it. Of course producing a video alone and releasing it on a platform was possible before AI. But AI has made these actions much easier for individuals or very small media outlets. And the lowering of cost of production means that a lot more voices, geographies, perspectives can potentially be represented, which is not when you have a more monolithic and centralized news industry.
What are the main risks of this use of AI in the news?
The really well-established problem is around misinformation and disinformation, with the growing ease of creating content that is misleading, intended to persuade people. The trouble is that many of the technical tools that are being put on the table to authentificate content, such as watermarks, are soon proving to be ineffective. And so we really don’t know how to help people figure out what is real and what is fake. Besides, the quality of information produced by classic news organizations has declined, for a variety of reasons, including because their ad revenues are being decimated by social media and now being further decimated by generative AI. Most young people today in India are no more watching the news or reading newspapers or even news websites. Many just look at the generative AI results. And the trustworthiness of that has really declined. If we don’t fix the problem, there’s also the risk that states come down with very high-handed regulation that has an impact on freedom of speech, or otherwise let social media platforms become the arbiters to verify what is accurate.
This piece is taken from the 16th issue of Mediation, titled ‘Information in the age of IA’, which you’ll find attached at the top of this article or here.