iTromsø wins Anne Jacobsens minnepris for AI journalism

The Norwegian news outlet iTromsø has been awarded the Anne Jacobsens minnepris for its pioneering work in integrating artificial intelligence with journalism. The award recognizes projects that strengthen public discourse and combat disinformation through innovative technology.

Key achievements cited by the jury include the project ‘Byen vår’, which utilized public datasets to visualize social inequalities in Tromsø, leading to a 20 million NOK municipal allocation to address these disparities. Additionally, the newsroom developed its own AI detection tools to uncover non-existent research in municipal school reports and used AI to analyze over 1,000 pages of documents to expose patient safety breaches at UNN.

In a separate commentary, a professor from NTNU discusses the cognitive implications of smartphones and AI, using a Lego analogy to describe the difference between basic building blocks of knowledge and the complex, specialized structures required for advanced learning and language acquisition.