Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper Le Quoc Minh outlined the “Digital Brain” plan and a set of 10 strict ethical rules aimed at protecting the core human values of journalism in the face of the new wave of technology.
From Hong Kong (China), Jun Zhang, Chief Technology Officer of the South China Morning Post, brought lessons on redefining the way news is consumed through a “Flexible Content System” to effectively address challenges posed by search algorithms worldwide.
Representing the multinational media group Hearst Newspapers (the US), Derrick Ho opened up a vision of the era of “agentic AI”, where machines assist in processing raw data, giving journalists more time to pursue stories with emotional depth.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Quoc Huy, representing Ho Chi Minh City Radio and Television, presented an overview of the roadmap for building a shared AI framework and big-data architecture to comprehensively optimise the multimedia television production process.
From the experience of the purely digital newspaper VnExpress, Dang Tien Ngoc also made a strong impression with the “vibe coding” approach, demonstrating the ability to shorten the development time for interactive journalism products from weeks to just a few seconds.
Overall, leading news organisations internationally and in Viet Nam share a common overarching vision: the indispensable role of humans in the production process in ensuring the integrity and authenticity of journalistic information.
Nhan Dan Newspaper narrows the “AI trust gap” and shifts towards “Journalism in AI”
At the forum, Le Quoc Minh, Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper and Chairman of the Vietnam Journalists Association, affirmed that the journalism industry is facing a historic turning point as artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally changes the way journalism is practised.
In reality, eight entries submitted for the recent US Pulitzer Prizes used the assistance of artificial intelligence, and five of them won awards. However, Le Quoc Minh also placed particular emphasis on a thought-provoking issue concerning the “AI trust gap” today: “62% of the public trust content produced by humans, while only 12% feel comfortable with news created entirely by AI.”
According to the Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper, although AI provides an opportunity to analyse huge volumes of documents in a matter of days rather than weeks, technology can never replace the experience, understanding and ethical responsibility of journalists. He warned of two dangerous phenomena that AI is exploiting to “retain” users. Flattery is a method AI uses to say what users want to hear instead of presenting objective truth. In addition, AI also causes users to “give up awareness”, becoming completely accustomed to an uncritical reflex in response to suggestions from machines.
That is why the Chairman of the Vietnam Journalists Association requires “newsrooms to uphold the ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle, meaning that humans must control AI by participating in the manual review process”.
In response to the realities of the digital technology era and to protect the core values that journalism brings to the community, the Vietnam Journalists Association has issued 10 rules on the use of AI, considering it a supporting tool rather than a source of information or a replacement. Accordingly, journalists are strictly prohibited from using artificial intelligence to create misleading content and are required to transparently label products involving AI intervention.
Le Quoc Minh also shared: “In reality, AI brings many effective benefits to labour productivity at the initial stage, but it also leads to a situation in which newsrooms and mid-level editors face an increased workload as they have to carry out the additional task of checking whether reporters are abusing AI. Not to mention that journalism today also has to deal with the phenomenon of social media platforms using AI tools to ‘absorb’ content and readers, while journalism, as a trusted source of news, is gradually losing its audience.”
Against this backdrop, Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper proposed that newsrooms shift from “AI in journalism” to “Journalism in AI”, where content must be structured by tagging categories and supporting information so that machines can understand and classify news. Moreover, newsrooms must resolutely reconnect and form the collective strength of hundreds of news organisations in order to demand that major technology corporations pay adequate copyright fees.
In management practice at Nhan Dan Newspaper, Editor-in-Chief Le Quoc Minh has implemented the “Digital Brain” plan to manage the newsroom comprehensively, from automating the layout of newspaper pages according to different layers for monthly publications to using automated royalty-calculation software based on quantitative criteria to ensure fairness before human approval.
Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper also shared his experience of using AI systems to summarise and analyse specialised documents, for example, processing 3,000 pages of conference reports within a short period, and helping monitor the progress of media contracts with 34 provinces and cities to issue timely warnings.
In particular, a highly humane project introduced by Le Quoc Minh at the forum involved using AI to “record the memoirs of veteran journalists, in which AI serves as a system for organising and cross-checking fragmented memories from multiple sources to create a complete historical story”.
The Chairman of the Vietnam Journalists Association also noted that Vietnamese news organisations need to pay attention to combining advanced international AI systems with domestic large language models developed by and under the technological control of domestic businesses, organisations or research institutions, in order to ensure accuracy and information sovereignty when dealing with issues specific to Viet Nam.
