Víctor Bautista: "The journalist who doesn't understand AI will be blind, but the one who doesn't understand ethics will be naked"

Santo Domingo.- Journalist and strategic consultant Víctor Bautista warned that generative artificial intelligence has redistributed narrative power in the media and that journalists who do not master this technology "will be blind," although those who use it without an ethical framework "will be naked." Bautista, CEO of Mediáticos Consultores en Comunicación, spoke as a lecturer at the III Congress of Digital Media and Social Networks organized by the Fundación del Círculo de Medios Digitales y Redes Sociales (FUCIMDRES), held in Santo Domingo under the slogan "Transforming the informational narrative with artificial intelligence". In his presentation "Strategic Communication and Digital Media: The New Power of Narrative", the writer and columnist also presented data from the Reuters Institute of Oxford according to which the weekly use of AI tools doubled in just one year from 18 to 34 percent and noted that almost one in three users no longer clicks on the source link when receiving a response generated by artificial intelligence in search engines.

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"Speed without verification is propaganda. Transparency is the new credibility. And the narrative remains human," Bautista told the attendees of the congress, dedicated to the journalist, writer and director of Listín Diario, Miguel Franjul. The speaker stated that the contemporary journalist needs to become a "request engineer" capable of formulating precise instructions to artificial intelligence models to obtain relevant findings, and highlighted the deep documentary research capabilities offered by platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. "A Dominican journalist with a smartphone today has access to investigative capabilities that five years ago were only available in newsrooms with multimillion-dollar budgets. What has not been reduced is the asymmetry of training," said Bautista, who is the author of the book "The Invisible Co-pilot, AI to manage crises and narratives." Bautista cited international cases such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, which developed a research assistant to navigate 350,000 archived articles; Infobae's ScribNews platform, which increased editorial productivity by 35 percent; and the COA Beat Assistant in the Philippines, which reduced the time for analyzing government audit reports by 80 percent. In terms of ethics, the consultant warned about the "AI slop" phenomenon — low-quality synthetic content and recalled that in 2024 and 2025, AI-generated videos were broadcast as real news on international television networks. "The cost of manufacturing a reputational crisis is zero dollars. The cost of recovery is incalculable," he warned.

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The day was inaugurated by Franjul with the conference "Artificial Intelligence and robot journalists: Allies or replaced?" and also featured the participation of the director of the Governmental Office of Technologies of Information and Communication (OGTIC), Edgar de Jesús Batista Carrasco, and news anchor Roberto Cavada, among other speakers. The congress included panels on credibility in digital times, with journalists Azize Melgen and Evelyn Belliard, and on young journalism and public agenda, with communicators Cristian Cabrera, Shaddai Eves and Gilbert Guzman.