Show Notes
Natali Helberger, Professor of Law and Digital Technology at the University of Amsterdam, joins host Nikita Roy to explore the complex ethical landscape of AI in journalism. In this conversation, they discuss everything from recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles to the EU AI Act and the future of responsible AI adoption in media.
Recognized as one of the "100 brilliant women in AI ethics" to follow worldwide, Helberger is also the co-founder of the AI Media and Democracy lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on how AI and algorithms are transforming society and the media, with implications for law and governance. Helberger chairs the Council of Europe Expert Group on AI and Freedom of Expression and serves on the advisory board of the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford. She regularly advises national and European policymakers, including the European Commission, European Parliament, and UNESCO.
Key topics include: The ethical challenges of AI-driven personalization in news The importance of audience inclusion and feedback in AI systems for news The limitations of simply labeling content as "AI-generated" and the need for more meaningful transparency An analysis of the EU AI Act and its implications for media companies
Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Newsroom Robots
For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.
At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.
AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.
Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.