Last week Laura Ellis, Head of Technology Forecasting at the BBC, addressed Eton’s Careers Society (VocSoc) on the future role of AI in the media.
Ms Ellis explained that her 30-year career in journalism, and experience with creating and monitoring news, helped to develop her as a ‘technologist’.
She described how recent advances in AI and machine learning have led to the advent of highly-realistic ‘deepfakes’. This new form of synthetic media alters images or videos of people saying or doing things they didn’t actually say or do.
There are, Ms Ellis clarified, problems regarding fake news. It might be possible in the future for legitimate news sources to potentially ‘stamp’ their work to demonstrate its credibility.
The society meeting ended with a series of questions, covering not only the future of the BBC as a commercial, subscription-based model, but also the possibility for its expansion into social media.
I would like to personally thank Laura Ellis for her engaging and informative talk.
