Journalism Transformation and Challenges in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Exploring Malaysian Journalists’ and Journalism Students’ Perspectives

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the journalism industry, which is known as automated journalism, helps to improve the efficiency of the newsrooms. The purpose of this research was to emphasise the importance of technological advancement in the Malaysian journalism industry. Furthermore, this research fills a research gap in Malaysian journalists’ and journalism students’ perspectives on the development of AI technology in the industry. Drowning from that, technological determinism (TD) theory was applied in this research to explain the relationship between technological development and the changes in news readers’ social attitudes. This research was conducted as a qualitative study using the interview approach. The researcher interviewed a total of nine interviewees, which included five Malaysian journalists and four Malaysian journalism students. According to the data collected, a total of three themes emerged: the opportunities AI brings to the journalism field, the challenges AI brings to the journalism field, and the future of the Malaysian journalism field integrated with AI. Findings revealed that AI could provide convenience and save the time of journalists yet cannot replace humans due to the lack of emotions. The interviewees perceived that AI technology will not be widely implemented in the Malaysian journalism field in five to ten years. In addition, this research highlighted that future journalists should be trained to adapt well to AI. Meanwhile, this research proved that AI could assist in reducing the journalist’s workload. Hence, the journalists would distribute more time doing in-depth news articles.