Striking the (im)balance – a review of the relative prevalence of meta-ethical models in AI journalism research

Abstract

Classical institutionalized journalistic ethics struggle to deal with the implications of using AI tools, as these tools both create new ethical issues, and new forms of existing ethical issues. This paper reviews how the fields of journalistic research, computer science, and philosophy address emerging ethical challenges in the wake of the wide-scale introduction of AI tools to journalistic practice. It reviews the types of issues researchers attempt to solve and how they approach them from the viewpoint of three dominant ethical models. The paper finds that utilitarian - predominantly negative utilitarian - models are prevalent, and deontological and virtue ethical models are not represented well. I describe why this lack of virtue ethics, deontology and/or mixed models impedes innovation with regards to handling certain types of ethical problems in AI journalism. I argue that if these models were to become more prevalent, this could contribute in a number of ways to AI journalism research in the included fields of computer science, philosophy, and journalism.