Google has launched a free training course for journalists all around the world. The training course has been made available in 17 languages on the Google News Initiative Training Centre. The training course aims to teach journalists about the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) on their profession. 

In 2019, a global survey was conducted by Google about the use of artificial intelligence by news organisations. In the survey, most of the respondents emphasized the urgent requirement of educating and training their newsroom on the potential offered by machine learning and other artificial intelligence powered technologies.

“Improving AI literacy was seen as vital to change the culture and improve understanding of new tools and systems”, said Mattia Peretti, manager of the programme called JournalismAI.

JournalismAI has produced the new training course with VRT News and the Google News Initiative (GNI). They realised the importance of the newsroom embracing the technology and generating the ideas and expertise for AI projects. They realised that the more the significance given to this, the better the outcome.

“This Introduction to Machine Learning is built by journalists, for journalists, and it will help answer questions such as: What is machine learning? How do you train a machine learning model? What can journalists and news organizations do with it and why is it important to use it responsibly?” said Google.

The AI powered technologies will give deep insight into breaking stories using data analytics. This new field is incredibly important because it allows journalists insight from massive datasets. This would be difficult to achieve without the benefit of machine learning. 

The course can be accessed on the Google News Initiative Centre. By logging in, one can also track their progress. One will be provided with a certificate on the completion of the training course. This training centre has a variety of other training courses as well. These courses are aimed at helping journalists find, verify and tell news stories online.

It is a difficult time for journalists and news organizations worldwide owing to the outbreak of COVID 19. “With JournalismAI, we want to play our role in helping to minimize costs and enhance opportunities for the industry through these new technologies,” said Google. 

“After this course, and the previous training module with strategic suggestions on AI adoption, we are planning to design more training resources on AI and machine learning for journalists later this year,” said Peretti.