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Arab Media Forum: Journalists urged to embrace AI, evolve with tech for better employability
The emergence of AI will not be a menace to future employment opportunities, it will augment the responsibilities of media professionals
Arab Media Forum. Photo: M Sajjad
The media landscape is undergoing a significant transformation due to Artificial Intelligence (AI), and experts encourage community members to stay updated with evolving technologies to enhance their chances of being hired.
They also reiterated that the transformation and integration of AI align with the vision of the country's leadership, driving change across various sectors. This was highlighted during one of the key discussions at the Arab Media Forum that kicked off on Tuesday in Dubai.
Mona Al Marri, Vice-Chairperson, Managing Director of Dubai Media Council, and President of Dubai Press Club, said, "Media today is very different from what we knew in the past. The variables have changed. It has accelerated a lot. The media now needs to keep up with the changes that occur constantly."
Mona Al Marri, Vice-Chairperson, Managing Director of Dubai Media Council, and President of Dubai Press Club. Photo: M Sajjad
She explained that in 2001, during the official inauguration of the Arab Media Forum everyone spoke about the emergence and use of cell phones. "That time, only a few people raised their hands and said they had mobile phones. Now, if we ask the same question, I am sure everyone will raise their hands and say they use their phones for a lot of things, including consuming news and information."
Al Marri pointed out that the emergence of AI will not be a menace to future employment opportunities; rather, it will augment the responsibilities of media professionals.
"64 per cent of people today use smartphones to consume news and entertainment. Technology, particularly AI, is further changing the game. This means newer opportunities. If you don't keep up with the change, you are being stubborn. This is the change that the Arab world is gearing up and this is the roadmap and vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. This change is represented in every sector. We have to keep up with the change and create new opportunities for the youth," she added.
Arab Media Forum. Photo: M Sajjad
AI to create new roles
Speaking on the nature and impact of AI on Media, Dr Nizar Habash, Professor of Computer Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, said that people need to understand that AI will amend and enhance the nature of current roles.
"What will happen is a shift. Certain types of jobs will disappear, but new jobs will emerge. People will do different things as a result. So, it's not that the job in the sense of the position will disappear, but the nature of what happens in the position will change. People will start doing things that are less routine and perhaps more connected to content and depth than what is currently done," added Habash.
Talking about the New York University Abu Dhabi's Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab, he explains how universities have increased AI capabilities in this space.
"Our lab is about nine years old, and this is a lab that specialises in work on Arabic natural language processing or AI for Arabic. So, we do work related to Arabic disambiguation automatic discretisation, syntactic analysis, translation, or dialectical modelling because Arabic has a lot of complexities that go beyond what you see in English or Chinese. All of these are done with funding from NYU to support our research and external funding from outside sources," he added.
Experts also emphasised how the UAE has upped its generative AI credentials with the launch of "Falcon LLM" and Noor, a foundational large language model (LLM) with 40 billion parameters.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a global scientific research centre and the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has been the front-runner in this case.
Dr Ebtesam Almazrouei, Executive Director, Technology Innovation Institute, said, "AI was born in 1950. There were developments from researchers, but there were no computer resources to use these (AI) back then. So, it feels as if AI made a fairly recent advent. Now, generative AI is witnessing a leap in technological growth. AI is available in Arabic, English, and other models. Now local institutions are also looking at using these AI models."
She adds, "We are experiencing this advancement in AI due to the smart strategies adopted by the UAE. For example, NYU is working on skills like the Falcon Project or Noor – it was the first language project in Arabic. This is what we mean by a digital revolution, and if we wish to interact with these, we must first understand these tools to make use of them."
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