Truth and Trust

By Kenny Yum

The CBC’s Chief of Staff and Strategy, Kenny Yum discusses how AI is being used in newsrooms today and how to use it as a tool without undermining truth and public trust.

Is AI an existential threat or an opportunity?

For journalism, it’s a little bit of both. For CBC News – in public service to Canada – it’s a reminder that as technology advances, you take advantage of it without giving up your core mission.

Our mission to tell Canada’s stories is built on the foundation of trust.

And trust, at the heart of it, is under threat.

For decades, the media has been adjusting and pivoting to how audiences are consuming content. Technology and platform changes have come at us in waves and we have responded. From print to digital, from broadcast to podcast and from cable to YouTube, we have used the opportunity to innovate or be irrelevant. So, with that battle-tested experience we were no less forced again to adapt for the latest shift when AI hit the public consciousness in late 2022.

Media making in 2026 is complex – so much work goes into creating and distributing content for audiences who are more connected all of the time and on countless platforms. Can AI help? Sure.

But we also ground ourselves on what is the promise we make to our audiences. We are grounding ourselves in what, over time, is likely to be more scarce or endangered: fact-based truth. Truth itself is under siege.

AI shouldn’t be given the keys to the creative or undermine truth. Editorial judgment, storytelling and sense-making must remain human-led. The content we create can’t be questioned on whether it’s real or not.

As a result, we don’t envision work that is generated by AI. And the reason is clear – using generative AI to create public-facing content, whether it be in text, audio or video – poses a great risk to public trust.

AI as a tool

In that vein, we are thinking, much like other organizations, on how AI can be used to assist us in our work. It is not a replacement technology, but one that our journalists can use as tools. AI is being used to speed up workflows – allowing journalists to spend less time on grunt work and more time framing stories, chasing leads and thinking critically.

Literacy is key. Right now, the technology is advancing fast – one day built as a separate chatbot interface and the next day integrated into our daily tools like emails. We think it’s important to create the space for our staff to learn more about the technology, and importantly, have our teams talk openly about how to use it.

Transparency helps build trust. We have recently updated and published our AI guidelines, both to our journalists but to the public at large. Having our principles stated, along with our promise to audience, is critical at this stage.

The acceleration of AI in our consumption ecosystem has made our work more complex. How does one verify images purported to come from a phone or an individual? Is a photo shared on a major platform viewed by millions, actually a photo or AI generated? Is content, news or entertainment real? Did that event, photo, video or news event actually happen?

The reality is that audiences now routinely question whether content they encounter through a scan or a scroll is real. The public we believe will demand the real. They will seek the authentic.

They will hunt for truth. They will turn to those they trust.

That’s where our work starts.