Project Proposal V2 - Cian, Darragh, Jake and Adam

Media Business Project

2023-24

Project Proposal

MIA

Adam Turner Cian Mangan

Darragh Kiely Jake Sharratt Martínez

Citizen KANE

V2

Synopsis: Team M.I.A has chosen Citizen KANE which is to curate an unbiased and personalised digital news application that integrates the use of artificial intelligence.

With there being a vast amount of news sites giving so many differing opinions, which one is telling the real story? We will explore these themes in the media business project.

Project aim: The main project aim is to develop an unbiased A.I. curated news application that can be used to put the power back into the user. The news articles that are shown are specially selected and sorted based off the users likes and dislikes, and to offer an intuitive and user-friendly interface.

Background

Bias In Media

Bias is the tendency to lean towards or away from something, influenced by your background and culture.

Bias leads people to make often untrue assumptions on a given topic.

Every news outlet has some inherent bias, be it social, political, or otherwise.

Some Forms of Media Bias

• Spin - The use of vague, dramatic, or sensationalist language to lead readers away from the objective facts.

• Opinion as fact - Some news outlets publish “Opinion pieces” which are fundamentally the opinion of the author, yet are presented as fact.

• Ad Hominem - A form of journalistic attack on someone’s character.

• Negativity Bias - Stories about negative topics get considerably more clicks and engagement. This preys on the public’s fear and outrage.

Existing AI News Applications

Feedly and Artifact:

• Allows the user to filter out articles which are irrelevant or uninteresting.

• Feedly makes use of AI to pick articles, Artifact uses user-driven machine learning.

• Makes for a more personalized user experience.

• Risks putting the user into an echo chamber.

NewsNotFound:

• Wholly AI generated news website.

• Articles are written by ChatGPT 4.0 from data scraped from articles all over the internet.

• Allegedly unbiased as it takes only the reported facts to use in the articles.

Objectives.

• Research and determine the best A.I. to use for our news app.

• Design the methodology of the A.I.’s user personalised content.

• Build a Prototype of the App.

• User testing to better understand and improve the user experience.

• Develop full Adobe XD Animation Concept

Team Roles:

Everyone is doing research for their part of the project. However, everyone is also taking part in doing a particular job:

● Cian is the animator of the project. He is the one working on animating different assets that are given.

● Darragh and Adam are both focused on prototyping and video editing. They will test the design and the A.I. to see if it is fit for use and they will also work on a video to showcase the program.

● Jake is the illustrator. He helps with making designs and UI for the project, and researching how a news site should be like.

Timetable

• Week 5: Team MIA will meet on campus to present their project proposal and take on board any relevant feedback to improve their idea.

• Week 6 - 7: Team MIA will do some prototyping and product testing on peers/family to see if their idea would meet the needs of their target audience and they will take feedback from their tests and implement necessary improvements and changes.

• Week 8: Team MIA will prepare the research document for submission which will include all of their relevant research done since week 1 to show how they started and got to where they are now and to show the changes they implemented in order to satisfy the target audience based on feedback they got via prototyping.

• Week 9: Team MIA will spend this week perfecting their prototype and to prepare it for their prototype presentation.

• Week 10: This week Team MIA will present their prototype.

• Week 11: Team MIA will go through all of their documentation, prototypes and research to ensure that they have a project that they are all happy to be submitting.

• Week 12: Team MIA will submit their final presentation and report.