Media outlets across Latin America are finding novel ways to navigate the tsunami of change unleashed by fast-evolving AI.
Among these players are innovative organisations that were working with AI long before the wave set off by ChatGPT in 2022, as well as new adopters of the technology, and those proposing structural change in the media ecosystem.
This is happening in a region with less access to the major AI companies, and where English, the standard language of most apps and tools, isn’t predominantly spoken. The challenges these outlets face differ from those confronted by their counterparts in more developed markets, and can serve as a reference for what is happening in other developing countries.
The International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) supports media initiatives across Latin America that are charting their own path when it comes to AI. They demonstrate the active, prominent role that countries in the region – and elsewhere in the Global South – are playing in the development, experimentation, and discussion surrounding artificial intelligence in journalism.
Argentina
In 2021, the Argentine regional media outlet La Gaceta developed Scuore Editorial, a platform that helps editors make data-driven decisions around distributing content. The tool tracks story performance, and evaluates the traction and importance of entities mentioned within them, to help the newsroom optimize its content. Last year, it added an AI layer to make it more efficient.
The fact-checking initiative Chequeado recently developed “El Explorador,” a conversational chatbot that dives into its archives to answer audience questions. Chequeado also plans to convert one of its most successful public-facing AI tools, “El Desgrabador,” to a freemium model. El Explorador and El Desgrabador are offerings in Chequeado’s suite of tools called “Chequeabot,” which it first developed in 2016. Chequeabot also offers tools that conduct live fact-checking, produce automatic transcriptions, and link to large databases for more context.
Brazil
Agência Pública, which has long monitored the impact of its articles with an internal platform called Pública IQ, recently added an AI layer to facilitate the effort by automatically searching and identifying references to its reporting. The newsroom plans to scale the product and offer it to third parties as a revenue-generating paid service.
Colombia
In Colombia, Cuestión Pública, which in 2023 developed an AI-powered tool called Odín that expedites the publishing of posts and threads on X by pulling information from the newsroom’s databases, recently launched an automated newsletter integrated with its CRM and payment gateway to support its membership strategy. In a separate push, the outlet incorporated automatic voice generation to aid the creation of their podcasts.
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