Abstract
Classical institutionalized journalistic ethics struggle to deal with the implications of using AI tools, as these tools both create new ethical issues, and new forms of existing ethical issues. This paper reviews how the fields of journalistic research, computer science, and philosophy address emerging ethical challenges in the wake of the wide-scale introduction of AI tools to journalistic practice. It reviews the types of issues researchers attempt to solve and how they approach them from the viewpoint of three dominant ethical models. The paper finds that utilitarian - predominantly negative utilitarian - models are prevalent, and deontological and virtue ethical models are not represented well. I describe why this lack of virtue ethics, deontology and/or mixed models impedes innovation with regards to handling certain types of ethical problems in AI journalism. I argue that if these models were to become more prevalent, this could contribute in a number of ways to AI journalism research in the included fields of computer science, philosophy, and journalism.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
