AI/Journalism/Distributed Ethics

Journalism is now constituted and interpenetrated by algorithmic actors that collect, process, and make decisions based on data. On the one hand, this suggests a radical transformation. The technologies that shape journalism no longer just place material limits and provide the technical affordances for journalism practice. Rather, algorithmic systems are designed to make decisions - including discussions about ethics - and to achieve a relative level of autonomy. On the other hand, ethical decision making in journalism has always been distributed between human, technical, and institutional agencies. Humanist philosophies of ethics have neglected the distributed cognition involved in ethics, because of their emphasis on the autonomous individual. As such, “distributed ethics” provides a description of digital journalism as well as a corrective to dominant theoretical approaches to journalism ethics.