KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Artificial Intelligence and its disruptive impact on the media industry dominated discussions at the Global Media Congress in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, with journalists, editors, and executives exchanging insights on the transformative technology's far-reaching implications and transformative potential.
Ahmad Al Alawi, Editor-in-Chief of AlAin News, said his newsroom was fully embracing the technology, viewing it as a means to enhance productivity in areas such as translation while reinforcing its role as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, human expertise.
"Journalism is journalism, this won't change. However, the tools we use have changed," he said during a panel discussion.
Not everyone shared the same optimism.
Mohammed Sergie, Editor of Semafor Gulf, expressed concerns that the scale of disruption could be so large that it might eventually render his own senior role at the business publication obsolete.
"I don't know when I will be replaced but it will be soon… the pace that this is moving at is too fast for most of us to comprehend," he said.
For Sergie, the advent of generative AI models that can scrape the internet for sources could ultimately change the way people consume news, warning that it could shake up and even dismantle the business models of many media companies.
Even with the growing capabilities of AI, Ahmed Faid, the founder of a UK-based social media news company, remains confident that his team's content would be hard to replicate. He emphasised how human-interest stories - often filmed for Snapchat and other social media – resonated with their audience far more effectively than anything AI could produce.
"It's really about human storytelling, I think it's hard to replicate someone's emotions," he said.
Dr. Yaser Bishr, an expert who has been working on digitising media companies like Al Jazeera and BusiNext for decades, offered a regionally focused perspective.
While he acknowledged that the disruption brought by AI was inevitable, he argued that its impact would be inherently limited in the Arabic-speaking world. With Arabic content accounting for less than 1% of the material available online, he noted, AI models would fail to grasp and convey the region's nuanced viewpoints and cultural context.
"The English content has Western thoughts and philosophies, and the data scientists are also Western, so that means the final product will always have a bias," he said.
"I think we need to change this; I appreciate projects like the Falcon model here in the UAE that will create local models built by local people for the region."