Thursday Seminars by Colette Brin

From the ashes of disruption: the search for human-centric AI innovation

Abstract

While generative AI promises efficiency gains in newsgathering, production, verification, and audience engagement, it also raises significant concerns regarding accuracy, bias, transparency, and professional autonomy. Drawing on a review of public service media AI initiatives and expert insights from Europe and Canada, as well as a series of media stakeholder interviews conducted in Quebec in 2025, this talk will address the challenges of human-centric journalistic innovation. Journalists’ responses remain ambivalent: AI tools are increasingly used, yet widely distrusted, reinforcing the necessity of a robust “human-in-the-loop” approach and substantial re-skilling that combines technical literacy with core journalistic values such as critical judgment, contextual knowledge, and integrity.

Bio

Colette Brin is a Professor at Université Laval’s Département d’information et de communication and Director of Centre d’études sur les médias, a nonprofit research unit founded in 1992. Her research and teaching focus on recent and ongoing changes in journalism, through policy and organizational initiatives, as well as citizens’ news practices. She coordinates the Canadian study for the Digital News Report with the Reuters Institute.

Colette is co-lead of the Arts, Media and Cultural Diversity Axis at OBVIA, an international responsible AI research network based in Quebec, and a member of several research teams in Quebec and Canada.