AI should embody our values: Investigating journalistic values to inform AI technology design

In the current climate of shrinking newsrooms and revenues, journalists face increasing pressures exerted by the industry’s for-profit focus and the expectation of intensified output. While AI-enabled journalism has great potential to help alleviate journalists’ pressures, it might also disrupt journalistic norms and, at worst, interfere with their duty to inform the public. For AI systems to be as useful as possible, designers should understand journalists’ professional values and incorporate them into their designs. We report findings from interviews with journalists to understand their perceptions of how professional values that are important to them (such as truth, impartiality and originality) might be supported and/or undermined by AI technologies. Based on these findings, we provide design insight and guidelines for incorporating values into the design of AI systems. We argue HCI design can achieve the strongest possible value alignment by moving beyond merely supporting important values, to truly embodying them.