Nikhil Pahwa – Page 2

TV Show: Regulating financial influencers

The influencer ecosystem has been gaining importance in India: they’re better than most media and experts at understanding consumer needs and packaging their content. Many of them are experts at what they do. They monetize their work through advertisements, product placements, and subscription based premium content or advisory models.

They thus replicate many of the functions of media publications.

I was on News9 to discuss a few controversies around the financial influencer space, now referred to as “finfluencers”, and frankly, as long as they don’t play in a regulated space such as stock advisory services, without the required regulatory certification/registration/license met, I think they’re providing an important service of financial education.

I also spoke about the upcoming Digital India Bill in the first part of the show.

TV Shows: Addressing job loss fears around AI

Are AI tools a boon or a bane. On TV shows and on conference panels, I’ve spoken about how AI tools actually make our work easier, and more efficient. Whether an organisation wants to do more with the greater efficiency or make people redundant is their decision, and no fault of the AI tools. It’s important for people to learn these tools, and add these skill sets.

Two TV shows:

On NDTV, here’s a clip of how we at MediaNama are using ChatGPT and other AI tools. We have, since June 2023, done a lot more, in terms of working on prompt engineering, and have even bought some tools to help us work.
On TimesNow, here’s a show from January 2023, on concerns of job losses with AI, where I talk about how it impacts creators, and address threats regarding job losses.

My show notes from the Jan 2023 discussion:

Here’s where AI is being used:

Drafting legal contracts
Designing rooms according to a theme and size
Generating written content, such as articles, blog posts, and scripts
Creating dialogue for characters in video games, movies, and TV shows
Generating song lyrics and poetry
Assisting with brainstorming and idea generation for advertising and marketing campaigns
Creating chatbot responses for customer service and virtual assistants
Finding the right image for a mood
Writing emails
Creating proposals
Writing marketing content
Improving emails you’ve written to be more respectful

ChatGPT AI has a clear bias: the dataset that it references. The final output should always be reviewed and edited by a human to ensure it is of high quality and appropriate for the intended use.
AI is going to get better with time. It uses a feedback loop to understand what humans want and what they dont.
AI can improve efficiency and productivity of individuals but an also lead to job losses for some. The market will change.
Impact industries like data entry, customer service, and other tasks that rely on language. ChatGPT can be used to quickly and accurately understand and respond to customer queries, allowing companies to improve their customer service and support. This can lead to improved efficiency and cost savings for businesses.
The development and deployment of ChatGPT and other language models can also create new job opportunities in fields such as data science, machine learning, and software engineering. People will need skilling.

TV Show: The cost of Internet Shutdowns

The function of a state is to protect our fundamental rights. When a government imposes an Internet Shutdown, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s unable to protect our fundamental right to free speech. Internet Shutdowns are a failure of governance. It’s also disproportionate. In order to shut down illegal speech, and sometimes they shut the Internet down when there are exams, they’re censoring all legitimate speech as well.

Digital India fails when there is no Internet. Digital Payments don’t work. Students can’t apply for exams or colleges.

India has the highest Internet Shutdowns in the world. It’s a shame.

On AI and its impact on News Media

I spoke at the Media Foundation Dialogues, organised by the Foundation for Media Professionals, held at the India International centre.

I really don’t think that journalists have anything to fear: AI tools can help them in their work, and will never entirely replace reporting. At MediaNama, we’re already using AI tools for transcription, and have started experimenting with prompts to clean copy, correct grammar, generate tweets from article, suggest article ideas, headlines, questions for interviews, speakers for conferences. We’re also creating tweets, threads, generating text to video, scripts for video. There’s so much more. The list will expand, as we become better at prompt engineering. AI will make things easier for journalists, not more difficult.

Creating and optimising videos for different platforms will be easier and faster. Processing videos will become so much more efficient.

The part that excites me most is how much translation and voice to text and text to voice will become over the next few years. That gives us the opportunity to cater to language audiences in India.

The business model challenges are of course going to increase, especially with increased advertising inventory, and fewer people required to do the same job. At the same time, this helps smaller publications punch far above their weight. How they navigate AI over the next few years is going to be critical.

A repeated some of the points I had made during the discussion, in a separate video for MediaNama: