Food criticism and storytelling in the age of social media algorithms
We all eat food and we all have ideas about what tastes good. But under the surface of our conversations about recipes and restaurants you’ll find rich veins of storytelling.
How do we share our cultural identities through food? What do restaurants, bars and cafes reveal about the cities in which we live? How do we know who to trust when there are influencers everywhere you turn? Are social platforms changing the way food writing happens altogether?
Join Kelly Wong from the ABC and Matt Shea from Brisbane Times for a conversation about where we are, how we got here and what the future holds for food criticism and storytelling through digital media.
Kelly Wong (she/her) is a social media producer at the ABC and lifelong food enthusiast. She overshares what she eats on Instagram and is an ex-food blogger who occasionally writes freelance about science, food, and culture.
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Conde Naste Traveller, Jetstar Magazine, Elle, Luxury Travel Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash
Event details
When: 5:30pm, Wednesday 27 March
Where: ABC Brisbane, 114 Grey St South Brisbane
Register: Humanitix
Last month – Generative visual AI in news organisations
Dr TJ Thomson was our guest for the first meetup for the year, a collaboration with ADM+S. Formerly at QUT and now at RMIT, TJ spoke to us about his research into generative visual AI in news organisations — its perceptions, challenges and opportunities.
Early in his talk he showed us some sample images from his research. These were the results of various Midjourney prompts relating to journalism: the more generic terms of journalist, reporter, correspondent and the press, and the more specialised concepts of news analyst, news commentator and fact checker. We talked about how these images reflected stereotypes of race, gender, class and age, as well as the appearance of anachronistic technologies like typewriters. TJ and his co-author have a much more detailed discussion in this paper.
TJ then shared some of the themes that had come out of conversations with journalists in news orgs in Australia and overseas about using generative visual AI. The challenges included misinformation and disinformation, labour and copyright implications, the difficulty of detecting AI, algorithmic bias, and reputational risk. On the other hand, many journalists identified opportunities, specifically around using AI imagery for illustrations, brainstorming and ideation, reducing costs, infographics and data visualisation, replacing stock imagery, metadata recognition, and automating layouts.
We had an extended Q&A with the audience in the room and on Zoom. One of the most interesting threads of conversation (IMO) started with a question about why the future often appears so blue in generated images, and ended up with the suggestion we were seeing a “creeping homogenisation of aesthetics” through the use of these technologies. Lots to think about!
From elsewhere
Queensland’s own QSO is raising questions about creative organisations’ use of AI imagery. Does it drive audience engagement or devalue visual artists?
This interview and timeline from NiemanLab nicely considers how journalists are telling a story amid a lot of mis- and dis-information.
Nine’s Michaela Whitbourn and The Visual Stories Team have put together a visual timeline of the night at the centre of Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson