From Human Insight to Machine Intelligence: Assessing GenAI’s Role in Nigerian Journalism

Abstract

The global growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has directly contributed to changes across newsrooms in Africa, including the rise in misinformation and disinformation. Before the advent of GenAI, big tech, including social media companies, relied on African Journalists to fact check content as part of their jobs to keep the platforms safe across the continent. Recently, these journalists have begun to adopt GenAI tools in the delivery of these duties, yet we know surprisingly little about how GenAI has affected their profession or how they are integrating these tools into their workflow. Nigeria’s newly-developed national AI strategy identifies misinformation as a societal risk, yet literature so far has focused on Western Countries and contexts. To contribute some nuance to existing scholarly research on the adoption of GenAI, this paper reports on the experiences of 20 journalists and fact-checkers working in Nigeria, and how AI has affected their practice. Our interviews found a growing shift from human insight to machine intelligence across newsrooms in the country. GenAI is changing age-long journalism practices in such a way that human sources are losing their primacy to automated tools. We discuss the implications for the design of GenAI tools to support journalists while preserving human sources.