Dott.ssa Caterina Foà Università della Svizzera Italiana - Istituto di Media e Giornalismo (IMeG)

 

Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism is reshaping professional practices, editorial processes, and governance frameworks across the sector.

 

This seminar reflects on two closely intertwined elements essential to ensure the responsible use of AI technologies: AI literacy and (self-) regulation. While AI is increasingly used throughout the entire news production cycle, its concrete impact remains difficult to assess, partly due to the rapid pace of technological innovation.

 

Most widespread applications currently involve operational tasks such as transcription, translation, and archive search, yet the growing use of generative AI raises pressing ethical concerns.  In this context, internal guidelines and ethics codes often prove insufficient to address the complex challenges brought by AI integration. This highlights the growing importance of AI literacy, understood as a set of knowledge, skills, and critical awareness that enables journalists to understand, assess, and interact effectively with algorithmic systems. AI literacy thus emerges as a strategic competence that goes beyond technical understanding and intersects with the organizational, ethical, and cultural dimensions of newsroom environments

 

 

. The seminar will explore recent approaches to defining and fostering AI literacy, alongside emerging (self-)regulatory tools, also in light of European policy frameworks such as the AI Act.

 

The aim is to stimulate a discussion on how to develop integrated strategies of capacity-building and governance to address the ongoing transformations in the information ecosystem while safeguarding the core principles of autonomy, transparency, and accountability.