In a session titled AI Literacy: Our Audiences and Staff at the ABU-Rai Days, a project by the Capital Maharaja Group’s radio network MBC, showcased an example of the positive social impact made when media and society join forces to create change.
The United Nations recognised, Gammada Project took journalists back to grass roots in an innovative approach “to solve problems for struggling villagers,” said MBC Networks Sri Lanka, CEO, Chevaan Daniel.
“The project was born from our network listening to villagers and reporting on their struggles.”
The driving desire was to then use this knowledge gained form visiting villages to influence the priorities of stories reported in news and to make a true difference to improving the villagers’ quality of life and in so doing, build the network’s credibility with rural communities.
By partnering with universities and sending their combined teams of News 1st volunteers and undergraduates on listening tours to gather data on village struggles, they identified rural Sri Lanka’s desperate need for infrastructure projects.
Daniel said, “In this way action was based on truth and through truth action… Now that the facts were apparent through data analysis we could work with the village to address the problem/s identified.”
MBC collected donations for projects so that village citizens could then help work towards implementing the infrastructure project. This was through the Gammadda Saviya Society which worked with villagers to form a community lead committee to implement Gammadda identified projects.
In the same session, the panel Moderator, Simona Martorelli, Rai’s Director, International Relations and European Affairs also highlighted other varied approaches used to educate audiences and staff across European and Asian regions.
“Our aim is to help up skill our colleagues to make better journalism through our new AI literacy course at the EBU Academy,” said Justin Kings, one of the speakers in a session titled AI Literacy: Our Audiences and Staff at the ABU-Rai Days.
“Collaboration is at the heart of our courses,” said Kings. “We identify best practise use of AI and work in partnership to develop our in house modules.” His preference is that in some courses, staff with different roles, developers and content leaders attend together for maximum benefit.”
Though they are only four months in, staff from EBU broadcasters have attended courses in critical thinking around the ethics of using AI and how to maximise the value of archives by using AI. They are currently working on developing courses around the importance of data and using AI to harness this.
Rai’s head of Digital and Transmedia Content Caterina Stagno talked about Rai’s Pills project against disinformation. The project aims to educate the audience to increase critical thinking and awareness of disinformation and impart knowledge of the mechanisms that are used to generate disinformation. The project also informs the public about countermeasures.
The whole organisation approach has been effective for training the audience to recognise AI generated disinformation. The graphic below shows the PILLS virtual anchorwoman presenting one of the 30 short videos released over 18 months, which had 848 million views across all Rai’s outlets.
