Tuesday 21st November 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023

Note: This talk will be preceded by a short AGM.

(Generative) AI such as ChatGPT and DALL:E promise to radically alter how “the news gets made” and how modern journalism works – with unknown effects for the public sphere and democracy. What are we to make of these claims and promises? And what will the journalism of the future look like? This talk will provide some tentative answers to these questions, based on four years’ worth of research at international news organisations.

Speakers: Maggie Mustaklem & Felix M. Simon

Maggie Mustaklem

Maggie Mustaklem is a design lead and doctoral researcher focusing on the implications of AI in design. Maggie’s research project, Design Interrupted, centres on the “everyday AI” in platforms like Pinterest, Instagram (and increasingly generative tools) that designers and architects use to search for inspiration. She is interested in how these tools may be flattening what designers see for inspiration, influencing what they ultimately produce. Maggie holds a Master of Arts in History of Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Felix M. Simon

Felix M. Simon is a communication researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), where he has been researching the effects of AI in journalism and the news industry for the last four years.  Felix has published and presented at a number of leading journals and conferences and has co-authored various research reports and papers on topics ranging from innovation in the media to COVID-19 misinformation. His research and commentary has appeared, among others, in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, and the Financial Times and he has given evidence to inquiries of the UK House of Lords and House of Commons, press regulator IMPRESS, and the United Nations. In May 2023, he was awarded the Hans Bausch Media Prize by German public broadcaster SWR in cooperation with the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Tübingen for his work on AI, news, and platform companies. Felix is a Knight News Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and an affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also works as a research assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). He graduated with a BA in Film and Media Studies as well as English Studies (Distinction) from Goethe-University Frankfurt, and he holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the OII. He is currently a fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar and an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and sits on the AI and Local News Steering Committee of Partnership on AI.