AI Accountability Fellows at DIG Festival

Join Senior AI Editor Joanna S. Kao and AI Accountability Fellows Clém Pouré, Tatsiana Ashurkevich, and Jonathan Moens at this year's DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. DIG (Documentaries Investigations Journalism) is a nonprofit organization based in Modena that focuses on the role of journalism in democratic societies. Their annual festival is a hub for reporters specializing in watchdog journalism.

Infrastructure, Data, Natural Resources and People. Investigating the Artificial Intelligence Supply Chain

September 26, 4:00-5:30pm

San Carlo College - Demontis Hall

Artificial intelligence now shapes stories on almost every desk in the newsroom. Reporters covering labor, politics, science or the environment increasingly find the same technology at the center of what they investigate: the workers who label the data that trains AI systems, often for low pay and little recognition; the automated decisions that determine who gets a job, a loan or a welfare payment; and the data centers whose demand for electricity and water is reshaping the towns that host them. 

This panel offers practical methods for investigating AI at each stage of its development: how these systems are built and trained, and how they are used once released. It draws on the Pulitzer Center's "AI Spotlight Series," a free training program created with the journalist Karen Hao, author of the bestselling Empire of AI, on the company that makes ChatGPT, and other leading reporters. The Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Fellows, journalists it funds and trains through a network it began in 2022, will describe the obstacles they met in their own investigations and how they worked past them. By the end, participants should feel more confident reporting on AI, and better able to tell stories about it that rest on evidence rather than on marketing hype or predictions of doom.

Fact-Checking the Future: AI, Technofascism, and the Unmaking of Democracy

September 27, 2:00-3:00pm 

San Carlo College - Theatre

Technology is no longer a beat about products and platforms. It has become an eminently political domain, arguably one of the most central arenas in which power is now contested and exercised. A new kind of authority has taken shape at the intersection of Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence, and a resurgent far right: a convergence of data firms like Palantir, the tech billionaires now openly aligned with authoritarian politics, and the AI systems reshaping how populations are watched, sorted, and governed. 

It is one of the defining stories of this moment in history, and also one of the hardest and most dangerous to report. The companies at its center often own the very platforms through which any story reaches the public, the technology moves faster than the newsroom, and the phenomenon no longer stops at the American border, arriving in Europe and beyond as export, template, and even warning. 

This panel brings together journalists working at the front of that story to talk about the craft of it. How do you investigate a system built to be opaque? What does it take to hold accountable those who control the infrastructure of attention and artificial intelligence? And how is the reporting adapting as the story crosses borders and outpaces the tools we have to tell it? It will also reflect on how technology journalism has itself been transformed. Once a specialism of gadgets, launches, and markets, it has been pushed into political and investigative work, and into the risks that come with it: legal intimidation, surveillance, the difficulty of scrutinizing the very companies that control how journalism is distributed and now produced, and the harder task still of exposing the firms that build the digital tools of oppression for the new authoritarianism.