The News and Media Focus Area investigates, with the aim to improve, the uses and impacts of automated decision-making in news work, social media platforms, and the digital media and communication environment more broadly.
Modern digital news and media platforms deploy automated decision-making systems intensively, with positive as well as problematic results. Search engines, personalised newsfeeds, content moderation systems and programmatic advertising all play integral roles in media.
This enables new forms of computer-assisted reporting and audience analytics in journalism, but also creates risks to democratic processes and social cohesion through the automated curation of personalised information and the algorithmic amplification of misinformation and other social harms based on selection principles that are transparent and inequitable.
Building on novel and innovative research frameworks, the News and Media Focus Area investigates the impact of automated decision-making in this field.
AI AND AUTOMATED DECISION-MAKING IN NEWS AND MEDIA
The AI and Automated Decision-Making in News and Media report provides better public understanding of this current phase of media automation. In a fast-moving landscape, there is much that policymakers, industry participants, researchers and citizens need to know.
This report:
- Describes the latest phase of media automation, driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI)
- Outlines four critical examples of the use of AI and automation in news and media
- Provides a basic explanation of how these systems work at the technical level and show how they operate in context, drawing on examples and case studies across news and media
- Maps emerging challenges associated with the use of each technology across the news and media environment, drawing on peer-reviewed research from multiple disciplines
- Looks ahead to the rise of generative AI
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS (2024-2027)
Advancing knowledge about the impacts and entanglements of ADM and AI with ecosystems and multi species and the capacity of institutions to make responsible decisions about ADM and AI applications on the environment and animals.
Creating new methods to document emerging forms of automated advertising, and enabling industry, civil society and government to respond to the challenges it poses for observability and accountability.
Our premise is that everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from digital technologies: to manage their health, access education and services, participate in cultural activities, organise their finances, follow news and media, and connect with family, friends, and the wider world.
COMPLETED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Investigating the impact of Generative AI on organisational structures and inter-organisational interactions and creating robust AI systems better designed for organisational use.
Investigating the challenges and opportunities for cultural and linguistic diversity in automated decision-making and AI across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
Examining the assumptions and community impacts of proposed solutions to the problem of authenticity in Generative AI and exploring novel technical responses that contribute to more responsible, ethical and inclusive ADM systems.
Developing and testing a novel suite of generative and data driven simulations, useful for depicting current and future urban scenarios, including in mobility, urban policymaking, and health domains.
Addressing the knowledge, skills and literacies – the critical capabilities – needed to achieve inclusive AI in Australia.
Examining the impacts of diverse search queries on the breadth and quality of search engine outputs.
Developing strategies for intervening in the automated flow of culture to advance Centre priorities of responsive, ethical, and inclusive automated decision making.
Advancing knowledge about the impacts and entanglements of ADM and AI with ecosystems and multi species and the capacity of institutions to make responsible decisions about ADM and AI applications on the environment and animals.
Creating new methods to document emerging forms of automated advertising, and enabling industry, civil society and government to respond to the challenges it poses for observability and accountability.
This project maps a range of informal automated activities that proliferate within automated systems across various empirical domains, such as click farming, CAPTCHA hacking, phone farming, dropshipping, OTP scams, fraudulent loan apps, and free jacking.
This project seeks to generate better understandings of the functions, capacities, and normative role of humans within automated decision systems.
This project seeks to generate better understandings of the functions, capacities, and normative role of humans within automated decision systems.
Our premise is that everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from digital technologies: to manage their health, access education and services, participate in cultural activities, organise their finances, follow news and media, and connect with family, friends, and the wider world.
This project investigates the extent to which automated decision-making systems impact the provision of consumer insurance via pricing algorithms which may produce unfair outcomes for particular subsets of society by engaging in proxy and price discrimination.
Examining the ways in which automated decision-making systems impact public and shared space via sensors that produce actionable digital simulations, artefacts, and interfaces.
Trauma-informed AI: Developing and testing a practical AI audit framework for use in social services
This project seeks to co-design an innovative AI trauma-informed audit framework to assess the extent to which an AI’s decisions may generate new trauma or re-traumatise
This project is a partnership between ADM+S and the New South Wales Ombudsman to map and analyse the use of automated systems in state and local government sectors in New South Wales (NSW).
This project seeks to scope several approaches to deal with Automated Decision-Making and Decision-Support Systems-Related Risks (ADM/DSS RR) through norms and provide an evaluation of those approaches for their consideration in regulatory contexts.
This project aims to develop new computational methods to prevent language-oriented automated decision-making (ADM) systems from generating harmful content.
Working with Brimbank City Council and a wider reference group, the project team will co-design a robust AI governance strategy to guide the policies and practices for the development and deployment of AI systems.
Assessing prospective harms vs prospective benefits associated with ADM as a first step to amelioration.
The project will provide non-profit CEOs, managers, practitioners and board members with feasible strategies for getting into data analytics or assessing and building their organisation’s data capability.
Investigating the enablers of digital transformation and considers digital futures within the cultural sector through evaluating the outcomes of ACMI’s CEO Digital Mentoring Program.
This project unpicks the detail of the conceptual frameworks that inform ADM as well as the ways they are engaged in the everyday work practices of developers, designers, businesses and policy makers.
By documenting experiences of the so-called 17%, the people who see the world differently, this project reveals biases and threats of automated transport mobilities and also uncovers creative opportunity and innovation.
Experimenting with creative methods to explore future visions of automated mobilities in Australia.
Identifying the opportunities, enablers and barriers for public interest litigation to promote accountability and fairness in automated decision-making.
Examining the political economy of ‘sex tech’ in order to identify how sexual technologies are being governed at scale, how sexual data is being collected, stored, shared and monetised, and how the material benefits of sex tech may be more equitably distributed.
Indentifying how misunderstandings of harm and safety flow into flawed data logics and ineffective automated digital platform responses.
What shapes the environmental impacts of data centres cooling infrastructures?
Creating a replicable framework for building capacity (expertise, literacy, data partnerships and data governance) to unlock the social value and impact of advanced data analytics, AI and ADM across the not-for-profit sector.
This project brings together expertise in digital media, platform studies, and law with data science and machine learning to study the roles and data operations of bots – pre-programmed automated agents – on social media platforms.
Unpacking the biases in models that may come from the underlying data, or biases in software that could be designed with a specific purpose and angle from the developers’ point-of-view
Recent developments in machine learning and information access communities attempt to define fairness-aware metrics to incorporate into these frameworks. This project will address a number of research questions related to quantifying and measuring bias and engagement that remain unexplored.
Examining the challenges to, and opportunities for, liberal and democratic institutions and governance presented by ADM.
Developing a theoretically rich analysis of democracy and freedom given ADM.
Considering ethical approaches in the area of automated decision-making (ADM) and civic life with a focus on civic commitments and concerns.
Operationalising new data partnerships and implementing data analysis to improve non-profit and humanitarian sector work.
Exploring the role of everyday data practices and literacies in automated decision-making.
Examining common themes with respect to the issues raised by the collection, storage, and use of data for ADM across object domains.
Measuring digital inclusion and media use in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Examining the ways in which automated decision-making (ADM) is being integrated into the lives of diverse and non-dominant communities across Australia.
Considering ethical approaches in the area of automated decision-making (ADM) and civic life with a focus on civic commitments and concerns.
Mapping where ADM is and how it is being used in social services beyond Europe and North America, and into the Asia-Pacific region.
How might platform regulators and moderators better distinguish between education and information content, and other forms of sexual texts and imagery on social media platforms?
Creating a replicable framework for building capacity (expertise, literacy, data partnerships and data governance) to unlock the social value and impact of advanced data analytics, AI and ADM across the not-for-profit sector.
Providing strategies to address the potential harms posed by ‘dark ads’ and provide accountability and transparency mechanisms for targeted advertising.
Considering ethical approaches in the area of automated decision-making (ADM) and civic life with a focus on civic commitments and concerns.
This project will create a next generation recommender system that enables equitable allocation of constrained resources.
Investigating current developments in journalistic practice by conducting in-depth interviews with news workers, including journalists, social media editors, developers, programmers, computer scientists, graphic designers and social media marketing staff.
This project is a review of the current state of ADM implementation, practices and visions in different regions in the Global South.
This research aims to assess the extent to which search results are personalised, by various leading search engines and their algorithms, based on the profiles established by those search engines for their different users.