C+J 2026: Keynote: Arvind Narayanan: AI and journalism: skating where the puck is going

Keynote address, Computation + Journalism 2026 Symposium, Northwestern University Saturday, October 3, 2026 Arvind Naryanan, Princeton University “How should journalists prepare for the threats and opportunities likely to be presented by AI not just today but in five or ten years? I suggest that the best approach is to assume that most technical limitations of current AI will have been overcome, such as hallucination, writing style, memory, personalization, cost, speed, and usability, but human factors will remain and grow in importance, such as the need to build trust with sources or problems arising from human misuse of AI. Further, AI is not just a tool but also a structural force. I predict that the long-running migration of news beyond the newsroom will only accelerate, and I’ll argue that it is better to embrace this shift than resist it. Finally, AI creates many sources of new demand for journalistic expertise, such as epistemic oversight of chatbots and the broader AI-mediated information ecosystem. Sometimes big, structural shifts are more readily visible from the outside, and I hope that this outsider’s perspective on institutional change is interesting.”