The Pulitzer Center is now accepting applications for its third cohort (2024-2025) of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Accountability Fellowships.
AI and other predictive technologies have been used to make policy decisions, understand disease, teach our children, and monitor our work for years. The hype around generative AI is now supercharging the spread of these systems while citizens have little insight into how they work, who profits from them, and who gets hurt.
Through the AI Accountability Fellowships, the Pulitzer Center aims to support in-depth, high-impact reporting projects that document and explain the opportunities, harms, and regulatory and labor issues surrounding AI systems. The Fellowship program provides selected journalists with financial support, a community of peers, mentorship, and training to pursue in-depth reporting projects that interrogate how AI systems are funded, built, and deployed by corporations, governments, and other powerful actors.
Launched in 2022, the AI Accountability Fellowships have so far supported 18 journalists from five different continents. Previous Fellows reported on a vast range of in-depth stories that gives us a nuanced look at the real-life consequences of AI technologies. Their reporting has triggered policy reforms, sparked official inquiries, and inspired college newspapers to start their own investigations and student poets to examine AI accountability.
Specialty Fellowships
The Pulitzer Center is recruiting eight to ten journalists from anywhere in the world to report on the impacts of algorithmic and automated systems in their communities. We encourage journalists from the Global South and from communities that are underrepresented in the media to apply.
While we welcome projects on a broad range of issues, this year we are also placing special emphasis on certain topics. We are seeking to support at least one project on transparency and governance in relation to AI. This includes projects that follow the money across borders; shed light on opaque and harmful AI supply chains; or report on legislation, business practices, and organizations that exacerbate the lack of accountability and transparency of AI systems.
Applications for the 2024-2025 AI Accountability Fellowships are now open. The deadline is August 10, 2024.
Find more information here. Apply here.
Fellowship overview and requirements
The ten-months-long Fellowship starts in September 2024. Journalists selected as AI Accountability Fellows will be provided up to $20,000 to pursue their reporting projects. Funds can be used to pay for records requests, travel expenses, data analysis, and stipends, among other costs. In addition, the Fellows will have access to mentors from different fields and relevant training with a group of peers that will help strengthen their reporting projects.
Successful applicants will be expected to join a mandatory 90-minute meeting held every month and to engage with other Fellows in virtual meetings and on the community’s dedicated online platform. Such collaborations and participation in training sessions and meetings are requirements of the Fellowship program. Working and learning with a diverse group of journalists from around the world can illuminate unforeseen connections among stories and strengthen everyone’s projects with new perspectives. If you are pursuing a good story but cannot commit to the requirements of a Fellowship, you can try applying for an AI Reporting Grant.
We also require the sharing of methodologies and lessons learned so each story may serve as a blueprint for other newsrooms pursuing similar projects.
Find out more about the Fellowship by reading Frequently Asked Questions.
The AI Accountability Fellowship is a program under the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. The AI Accountability Network launched in 2022 to expand and diversify the field of journalists reporting on AI and with AI in the public interest. The Network is managed by Pulitzer Center Senior Editor Boyoung Lim, with the support of Executive Editor Marina Walker Guevara and the Pulitzer Center’s Editorial team.
Other programs supported by the AI Accountability Network include:
- Machine Learning Reporting Grants support journalists seeking to use machine learning to augment their reporting capacity on big data projects.
- AI Reporting Grants support shorter term, in-depth reporting projects that explore the impact of AI systems in communities around the world.
- The AI Spotlight Series is an online training series, free of charge, designed to equip reporters and editors with the knowledge and skills necessary to cover and shape coverage of AI and its profound influence on society.
The AI Accountability Network is funded with the support of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), MacArthur Foundation, Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, and individual donors and foundations who support our work more broadly
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