The president of the Spanish News Agency EFE, Miguel Angel Oliver, said that news agencies are "irreplaceable" at a time like the present and before the "prevailing noise" should serve to produce a "clean flow of information" in which artificial intelligence is welcome but "must be well educated.
In his speech at the 18th Congress of Publishers being held in Palencia (Spain), organised by CLABE, Oliver defended the role of agencies as providers of rigorous, detailed content, with careful and precise language.
He rejected the "pessimistic" view that the journalistic industry has given so far to the emergence of artificial intelligence and said: "I see it optimistically, as something that is inevitable" as was the emergence of other technologies in history and that we must "analyse and use".
"There has to be a contribution of the reality well checked and that is what the agencies do in their rigorous, detailed account and with a careful and precise language", said Oliver, for whom a "legitimate" line of business opens up in the possible agreements with AI platforms.
In this defense of well-checked information reality, the president of EFE defended the agency's territorial presence in Spain and around the world as one of its values and strengths.
A presence, he added, that reflects EFE's commitment to truthful information by being in the place where things happen and with direct access to the sources of information.
For his part, the director general of Servimedia said that artificial intelligence can help in the collection of election data, for example, but it can hardly interpret and analyse these results.
He warned that ethics must be associated with the use of artificial intelligence and that this must be adapted to the needs of professionals "who are the ones who have to ask the best question".
González-Huesa defended the role of the news agencies and recalled that it was the Italian ANSA that gave the scoop on the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI because the journalist who was covering the information knew Latin.
He concluded: "the journalist's main tool is the good use of language".
