Kashmir Hill, a features writer on the business desk at The New York Times, spoke about the promises and problems of artificial intelligence, social media and digital surveillance during the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation’s inaugural symposium at the University of Mississippi on April 2-3.
Hill, whose work focuses on how new technologies shape society, was one of the featured speakers at the event, which brought together journalists, scholars and students to examine the evolving role of media in a digital age.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a technology reporter,” Hill said. “I think about myself as a reporter on how technology is changing society.”
Since she started reporting in the late 2000s, just as the iPhone hit the market and Facebook became mainstream. Hill said she has been drawn to how technology intersects with people’s lives.
“It was this time of people putting much more data about themselves on the internet than ever before,” Hill said. “I was thinking a lot about what kind of data is being collected about us and how might it be used in ways that can benefit us but also harm us.”
Her book, “Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy,” investigates how Clearview AI uses facial recognition technology to identify people. Her recent work explores everything from AI-generated relationships to the ways corporations collect and profit from consumer information.
Surveillance and privacy are Hill’s top concerns. One of the most shocking stories she wrote was about Madison Square Garden using facial recognition to ban lawyers whose firms had filed lawsuits against it.
“That was a moment where it really clicked – how technology can open up this new era of discrimination… based on things that are not protected classes under our discrimination laws,” Hill said.
The duality of new technology is a common theme in Hill’s work. For example, she cites the data collected by modern vehicles.
“Cars are now connected,” Hill said. “There are benefits, but the downside of that is there is data being collected about how you’re driving, when you’re driving, where you’re driving.”
In her investigation, Hill found that General Motors was selling driver data to risk profiling companies working with insurance providers.
“Everything about how they drove was being reported out, and they were being given a score on their driving,” Hill said.
Despite technology’s reach, Hill said that maintaining privacy is not a lost cause.
“People say all the time that young people don’t care about privacy, and I just fully disagree with that. I think that privacy today looks very different because we’ve lived differently,” Hill said. “It’s more challenging today, but I don’t think we should give up.”
Hill says government intervention is needed to protect it.
“It’s like environmentalism. You can recycle, you can reuse, but you need bigger interventions from the government to really protect it. I think we’re at that place with privacy,” she said.
Hill recently reported on BNN Breaking, an AI generated newsroom.
“These systems are not perfect. They hallucinate… that particular site ended up defaming people, holding fake quotes, saying people were places they weren’t. It went wrong,” Hill said.
Hill warns that while AI can be helpful for journalists, such as scanning documents or creating audio versions of articles, it cannot replace them.
“AI is a mirror of ourselves, and all of this AI is based on what has come in the past. It’s not anticipating the future. It’s not anticipating what hasn’t happened yet, and that’s what we journalists do. We’re reacting to what’s happening, what is new,” Hill said.
Hill recently profiled a woman who “has been dating (ChatGPT) for months now. … It’s her boyfriend, her therapist, her personal trainer,” said Hill, who found the woman through a Reddit post.
“There’s a certain kind of reduction of human creativity that happens through using AI. It funnels us all to the same place,” Hill said.
Hill sees her role as helping readers understand this changing world and anticipate what’s coming.
“Is your child gonna fall in love with an AI app? And if they do, what do you do about it?” Hill said. “I’m just looking for those people that are living at the horizon. … Sometimes it’s a good horizon, and sometimes it’s people being arrested because facial recognition misidentified them. But those are the stories that show us what the future might look like.”
