The University of Mississippi’s Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation hosted its first symposium titled “Addressing the Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Democracy” on April 2-3.
The Jordan Center was created in 2024 through a $4 million donation made by two former UM professors, Jerry and Jean Jordan, with the goal of fostering critical media literacy.
For the event, industry experts, journalists and academics traveled from across the country to deliver speeches and participate in panels on topics including AI, social media, disinformation and censorship. Members of the public, students and faculty members attended the event.
“We wanted to bring the best thinkers together,” Interim Director of the Jordan Center Jamie Barnett said. “What we think we’ve done is create a cadre of a now-educated audience of people who can be warriors in seeking the truth and advocating for journalism.”
Andrea Hickerson, dean of the School of Journalism and New Media, explained why there was a focus on AI in particular.
“We need more public communicators that have a basic understanding of AI because there are a lot of risks to the public and opportunities,” Hickerson said. “We need more informed journalists, and we need more informed consumers, as well.”
Throughout the symposium, the pool of 14 guest speakers engaged in discussions about the role of AI in journalism and responsible development of the technology.
Keynote speaker Richard Lui — a news anchor for NBC and MSNBC — talked about the importance of exerting control over how AI uses news content.
“The news media has its own treasure trove of data. We have what the AI models need to feed in. We can own the AI engine and apply our journalistic standards to it,” Lui said. “We need to learn from the social media experience — when we gave away our content. We need to grab AI by the horns before it grabs us and steers us in another direction.”
Ian B. Crosby, lead attorney for the landmark case in which the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, said he envisions a world in which journalism and AI can positively co-exist and discussed some of the tool’s practical applications.
“(AI) is very useful for the needle in the haystack problem,” Crosby said. “You get some giant dump of government documents, and you want to write a story about that the next day. To have AI go through and pull out and say, ‘here are the key documents that hit on that.’ And that’s just one use.”
Elise Jordan, a Holly Springs, Miss., native and nationally acclaimed journalist, agreed about the importance of using AI in newsrooms and emphasized that it needs to be done responsibly.
“I think AI is going to completely transform the world — the newsroom included,” Jordan said. “So much of journalism is rejecting it. You’ve got to learn how to work with it, how to integrate it, and I’ve just been really interested in studying how we do this in a responsible way.”
Many speakers talked about why there needs to be caution in the development of AI tools.
Meetali Jain, founder and executive director of Tech Justice Law Project, participated in the panel discussion titled “Where Artificial Intelligence and the Law Collide.” Jain shared her worries for the future of AI and the rate at which AI is advancing.
“Mark Zuckerberg became famous for his motto, ‘move fast and break things.’ I now feel with AI it’s ‘move fast and break people.’ We need to have that conversation. I’m worried about this (Trump) administration’s rhetoric that AI needs to move ahead so that we can stay competitive with China.”
Justin Hendrix, CEO and editor of Tech Policy Press, spoke at the symposium on the panel called “Title of Talk: AI, Disinformation, ‘Censorship,’ and the Next Five Years.”
“I do think that AI, while it can be an incredibly useful tool for various purposes — speeding us up, etc. — robs us of that experience of synthesizing the information ourselves, the knowledge ourselves,” Hendrix said.
Meredith Broussard, a data journalist and professor at the Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, similarly talked about remembering the importance of human skills and interactions.
“One of the things that makes us happy is interacting with other human beings,” Broussard said. “This technological future where machines do everything and people sit home by themselves … that’s not a good way for human beings to live.”
Jerry Jordan closed the symposium by encouraging attendees to submit topic’s for next year’s gathering.
“I’d like to hear more about the First Amendment in the computer age or journalism in the age of capitalism,” Jordan said. “This has been an important thing that we’ve started.”
Similar to Barnett and Hickerson, Jordan also highlighted the importance of education.
“I do think the long game is education,” Jordan said. “If you don’t have an educated perspective in which you put the truth, you’re in trouble.”
Full interviews with symposium speakers are published on thedmonline.com.
