CITP Researcher Sayash Kapoor has advice for journalists covering AI

A laptopogram based on a neutral background and populated by scattered squared portraits, all monochromatic, grouped according to similarity. The groupings vary in size, ranging from single faces to overlapping collections of up to twelve. The facial expressions of all the individuals featured are neutral, represented through a mixture of ages and genders.

Image credit: Philipp Schmitt & AT&T Laboratories Cambridge / Better Images of AI / Data flock (faces) / CC-BY 4.0

Princeton CITP graduate student Sayash Kapoor — with coauthors Hilke Schellmann, a professor at New York University, and Dallas Morning News journalist Ari Sen — have created a guide for technology journalists on how to give more fair and accurate coverage of artificial intelligence. In How to report better on artificial intelligence, published the Columbia Journalism Review art, Kapoor, Schellmann and Sen warn reporters to not fall prey to hype, question the data, and research a tech company’s labor practices, among other tips. They also interviewed experts in tech and media.

“Reporters tend to just pick whatever the author or the model producer has said,” Abeba Birhane, an AI researcher and senior fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, said. “They just end up becoming a PR machine themselves for those tools.”

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review.