【Article by GCIT】
George Chen, Managing Director and Co-Chair of Digital Practice of The Asia was invited by distinguished professor Trisha Lin, the Director of the Master’s Program in Global Communication and Innovation Technology (GCIT) at National Chengchi University, to give GCIT students a lecture on the topic “From Pigeon to GenAI: How New Technologies Disrupt the Way How We Make and Get News” in early October.

With two decades of experience in media, technology, and public policy, George Chen had key positions at Meta, Reuters, and the South China Morning Post. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society and Governance at The University of Hong Kong. In the beginning, he introduced the history of news reporting and mentioned the important moments in history that shaped the media to the point as we know them at present. He used case studies of different media organizations to elaborate how they maneuvered the impact of innovative technologies.

Importantly, George Chen talked about how AI is shaping journalism in both positive and negative ways and what the concerns in the context of fake news and violation of copyright laws are, but also highlighted efforts of Big Tech in trying to overcome these challenges of misinformation on social media. He regarded GenAI as a distributive innovation in media and suggested that the AI governance and policy framework should consider its innovative evolving nature, without adding stringent regulatory constraints to limit its development. He also highlighted the darker aspects of GenAI, such as misinformation and deepfakes. However. He held a promising view towards Metaverse and forecasted that devices like smart glasses could eventually replace smartphones.

During the Q&A session, students asked about his perspectives about the future of AI. Chen acknowledged the possibility that AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT could introduce advertisements in the future, potentially reshaping how users interact with search results.