Automation, Journalism, and Human–Machine Communication: Rethinking Roles and Relationships of Humans and Machines in News

Abstract

In this article, we argue that journalism studies, and particularly research focused on automated journalism, has much to learn from Human-Machine Communication (HMC), an emerging conceptual framework and empirically grounded research domain that has formed in response to the growing number of technologies—such as chatbots, social bots, and other communicative agents enabled by developments in artificial intelligence (AI)—that are designed to function as message sources, rather than as message channels. While the underlying, but often unquestioned, theoretical assumption in most communication research is that humans are communicators and machines are mediators, within HMC this assumption is challenged by asking what happens when a machine steps into this formerly human role. More than merely a semantic move, this theoretical reorientation opens up new questions about who or what constitutes a communicator, how social relationships are established through exchange among humans and machines, and what the resulting implications may be for self, society, and communication. In the particular case of automated journalism—in which software assumes a news-writing role that has long been considered a distinctly central, and indeed human, element of journalism—the introduction of HMC offers a generative starting point for theory development, advancing our understanding of humans, machines, and news for an oncoming era of AI technologies.

Keywords:

• Artificial intelligence
• automated journalism
• automation
• communication theory
• human-machine communication
• journalism studies
• ontology
• research paradigms

Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate constructive feedback from reviewers of this article and journal editor Oscar Westlund, as well as comments offered by attendees at the Algorithms, Automation, and News conference, hosted by the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU-Munich in May 2018. The first author, Seth Lewis, also gratefully acknowledges the support of a 2017-2018 Agora Faculty Fellowship from the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon.

Notes

1 It is important to note that some of the discipline’s many research areas have more flexible definitions of communication that are inclusive of other entities such as machines and animals, as is the case in cybernetics (see Wiener 1950), or shift the focus of research onto the technology itself (e.g., McLuhan 1994). However, the guiding paradigm for communication and technology has been one of human activity mediated by machines (see Gunkel 2012).

2 Although HMC subsumes aspects of these different areas, it also is distinct from them. For example, HCI is its own interdisciplinary field that focuses on aspects of technology use well beyond questions of communication for a wide variety of technologies (e.g., Jacko and Sears 2003). The scope of HMC is narrower than that of HCI and is focused on specific technologies as they relate to communication theory. While bodies of work within communication, including critical, cultural and feminist approaches, have theorized technology as “communicative” (e.g., Marvin 1990), they have still focused on its role as a mediator. Within HMC, critical and cultural scholarship is used to critique technology that is designed as a communicator, addressing both its explicit and implicit messages.

3 It is important to note that although research in HMC proceeds under a different set of assumptions, its aim is not to invalidate the idea of technology as mediator. Nor does it preclude the possibility that a communicative technology, such as a social assistant, may also function as a mediator (see Guzman 2017). For HMC scholars, a technology can take on many roles within communication—including, now, the role of communicator. What is paramount is not limiting the role of technology within communication to that of mediator.

4 Research has shown that cultural knowledge and attitudes toward technology—gained, for example, through mass media portrayals—enter into how people make sense of existing and emerging devices and programs (e.g., Sundar, Waddell, and Jung 2016).