'Media professionals need to be upskilled to use AI tools'

‘Media professionals need to be upskilled to use AI tools’

Posted by author January 11, 2025 World

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On the sidelines of Al Jazeera Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Media, Zakir Ismailagic, Director of Training at Al Jazeera Media Institute, gave an exclusive interview to Gulf Times on the future of AI and its transformative impact on training media specialists.

He said: “Today, we are trying to create a melting pot between the technologies, and this is why we have big tech companies here, and the media outlets and agencies. Al Jazeera has been pioneering technology for a long time, and for some time we have been using AI tools, and we want to exchange information from other technology and media companies and share what we learn with them. We are going to share our own findings with the world. We want to make sure that everybody in Qatar and elsewhere will benefit from this event. Over 25% of the participants flew into Qatar for the conference, so it is getting to become an international conference, for sure we will continue this next year.”

Concerning the AI impact on media professionals, Ismailagic said: “We cannot predict in which way and what is going to happen, we are using tools and we are being cautious. AI is definitely cutting down the time when it comes to research, editing, and packaging. Sometimes, AI cuts the time of some tasks from days to hours, sometime into minutes, but we are using it cautiously, and we are not going to jeopardise our editorial or ethical values.”

As far as challenges are concerned, Ismailagic said: “When it comes to challenges of implementing AI, we need to understand ethical, and legal issues, then AI information accuracy issue when it comes to differentiate between true and fake news. On the top of all of this, professionals need to be upskilled to use AI tools, and this is where Al Jazeera Media Institute can be the bridge between all these initiatives and training later on. We are opening AI training programs for media personnel in Qatar and abroad.”

With the participation of a high-level international experts in this conference, Ismailagic said: “We are going to get some recommendations and we will turn them into training programs obviously. The experts that we are going to use are a combination between technology and the media. Right now, we combine the practical side with theory in our current training programs and we are going to continue doing exactly the same.

“Right now, we are using around 200 experts at the institute, some of them come from Al Jazeera, and others from the worldwide. We are collaborating with a variety of organisations to make sure that what we are going to offer in terms of AI training programmes is going to be developed first of all between technology companies, practitioners and academia too.”