AI is impacting industries across the world, and the media is one of them. How can we use AI to fact-check at scale when there’s risk of bias and misinformation? How does innovation and ease balance out with safeguards that protect journalism’s core values?

This was the central theme of the session “Can journalists make AI their ally?”, powered by the Canada High Commission, at The Media Rumble 2025 held in Bengaluru on October 3 and 4. 

Moderated by Newslaundry’s former product director Chitranshu Tewari, the panel featured BOOM managing editor Jency Jacob, How India Lives co-founder John Samuel Duraipandy, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation South Asia correspondent Salimah Shivji.

Chitranshu started the discussion by arguing that the “more important question” is how AI should be used. “How should we deploy it in a way that optimises for efficiency but doesn’t compromise on ethos or public interest journalism.”

John said that nearly 80 to 90 percent of the way journalists are using AI today is in data and information processing. “It’s not in writing. It’s not in publishing. It’s in the grunt work — processing large amounts of data, reading long documents, extracting information, and making sense of things before the journalism even begins.”

To Chitranshu’s question about the need for disclosures in case of use of AI and whether such disclosures will lead to further cynicism about the media, Jency said a boundary could be drawn between backend assistance and reader facing outputs. Jency pointed to cases where hyperrealistic visuals were published without adequate context, creating the illusion of photographic truth. In such cases where the image becomes the story, editorial responsibility increases.

But Salimah stressed that even when AI usage is disclosed and well-intentioned, it can still raise serious ethical questions in such cases. She spoke about a case from Canadian media where a broadcaster recreated the face of a rape survivor using AI while keeping the survivor’s real words intact. Despite full transparency and a published editorial explanation, the decision sparked widespread debate within the industry.

John had a broader critique of how AI is currently being deployed across Indian media. Much of what is framed as innovation, he argued, is still driven by legacy thinking. “A lot of AI decisions are still driven by sales and SEO teams, not newsroom pain points.”

He contrasted this with quieter but more meaningful shifts happening within newsrooms themselves. Journalists with limited technical backgrounds are building small internal tools using AI to solve everyday problems, from avoiding numerical errors to analysing sports data or reducing editing time in regional language publications. It was here that he returned to the metaphor that had anchored much of the discussion.

“The more you use AI, the more you realise it is a great intern. Would you depend on your intern to publish something without your scrutiny? You would not. And that is exactly how AI should be used in newsrooms.”

The session closed on a shared understanding across the panel. AI is neither a saviour nor a threat in itself. It is a tool whose impact depends entirely on intent, transparency, and restraint.

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