TV Show: The cost of Internet Shutdowns

The function of a state is to protect our fundamental rights. When a government imposes an Internet Shutdown, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s unable to protect our fundamental right to free speech. Internet Shutdowns are a failure of governance. It’s also disproportionate. In order to shut down illegal speech, and sometimes they shut the Internet down when there are exams, they’re censoring all legitimate speech as well.

Digital India fails when there is no Internet. Digital Payments don’t work. Students can’t apply for exams or colleges.

India has the highest Internet Shutdowns in the world. It’s a shame.

On AI and its impact on News Media

I spoke at the Media Foundation Dialogues, organised by the Foundation for Media Professionals, held at the India International centre.

I really don’t think that journalists have anything to fear: AI tools can help them in their work, and will never entirely replace reporting. At MediaNama, we’re already using AI tools for transcription, and have started experimenting with prompts to clean copy, correct grammar, generate tweets from article, suggest article ideas, headlines, questions for interviews, speakers for conferences. We’re also creating tweets, threads, generating text to video, scripts for video. There’s so much more. The list will expand, as we become better at prompt engineering. AI will make things easier for journalists, not more difficult.

Creating and optimising videos for different platforms will be easier and faster. Processing videos will become so much more efficient.

The part that excites me most is how much translation and voice to text and text to voice will become over the next few years. That gives us the opportunity to cater to language audiences in India.

The business model challenges are of course going to increase, especially with increased advertising inventory, and fewer people required to do the same job. At the same time, this helps smaller publications punch far above their weight. How they navigate AI over the next few years is going to be critical.

A repeated some of the points I had made during the discussion, in a separate video for MediaNama: