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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, at present, La Silla Vacía has a prototype that expedites the newsroom’s fact-checking efforts. The outlet also operates the "SillaBot," which readers can use to query information in the La Silla Vacía archive.
Paraguay
Early this year, El Surti began to integrate Guaraní, an official language in Paraguay alongside Spanish, into AI tools it was developing – an effort to reduce the digital divide for nearly 7 million people, in the country as well as Bolivia and Argentina. In community-led hackathons under the project, participants upload information in Guaraní, for example, through the Mozilla Common Voice project.
El Surti also operates its Eva chatbot, which recounts the story of a young woman deprived of her liberty due to illegal drug trafficking.
Other systemic impact initiatives
Although newsrooms are developing AI tools in efforts to innovate and strengthen their impact, media managers alone cannot address market imbalances and sustainability challenges that are exacerbated by tech platforms in the race for AI dominance. IFPIM, as a result, is also supporting research and knowledge sharing to better understand AI’s impact on journalism, and examine policy approaches and other strategies that can create a fairer value exchange between the tech companies that benefit from high-quality, verified information and the organisations that produce it.
In Brazil, IFPIM is supporting Momentum – the Journalism and Tech Task Force, an initiative exploring the intersections between journalism and technology globally, especially regarding AI and its impact on the news ecosystem. Momentum has produced several relevant publications, including a report looking at the impact of AI on Brazilian publishers, a policy brief on Big Tech taxation, and updated briefs on AI legislation currently under consideration in Brazil.
Colombia’s Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (FLIP) and Argentina’s Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas Argentinas (ADEPA) have conducted research into the adoption of AI in media while monitoring regulatory discussions in the two countries. ADEPA has also developed a guide for media using artificial intelligence, with recommendations of platforms, tools and workflows.
This year, IFPIM launched CTRL+J, a series of regional and global convenings to discuss solutions to challenges in media sustainability, AI regulation, and technological disruption, with a focus on markets in the Global South. It held the inaugural LatAm conference in São Paulo in March, followed by regional events for APAC in Jakarta in July, and for Africa in Johannesburg in September. IFPIM and regional partners are using CTRL+J to foster South-South learnings and deepen opportunities for collaboration between media, civil society, academics, regulators and technologists.
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