Digital is the future of media, and technologically assisted tools such as X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Facebook, Flickr, e-publications and YouTube are now dominating the media space. These technologies have democratised the media sphere and hugely altered news production, opening the gatekeeping processes in information flow.
People can easily ‘tell’ their own stories by side-stepping information gatekeepers or middlepersons who once controlled information and media products.
More importantly, machine learning innovations, including generative artificial intelligence, have had a huge impact on the media industry and journalism profession, which has forced global discussions, policy developments and the development of professional codes of ethics to guide the management of technology and media.
Media regulators such as the Media Council of Kenya were quick to develop industry guidelines on the use of AI in the media, including mainstreaming them in the code of conduct for media practice, even as individual media houses in Kenya have developed in-house editorial guidelines on AI use, while at the global level, discussions are ongoing, informed by lessons learnt by media practitioners, scholars and policy makers. Kenya is in the process of developing an AI law.
Among the most interesting sessions at the 2026 New York National Association of Broadcasters Show (NABShow) was PROTECT: Made by Who? Creativity, Credit, and Copyright in an AI World, which focused on content authorship, ownership, consent, attribution, intellectual property rights and copyright compliance in an AI-driven creative industry.
Similar issues came up, especially on content theft, compensation, plagiarism and copyright issues. Content theft and copyright infringement have denied original content creators and journalists authorship, ownership, or bylines as it were, denying them their intellectual property rights and, by extension, compensation for their work.
It’s true that AI has enabled the sharing of media content and local stories to get international attention, enhanced mass production of content cheaply and enabled widespread circulation of news through live streams of major events; little has been spared to care about the original story writers and content creators, and compensation for their investment.
Aware of the challenges posed by the new platforms, many media enterprises in Kenya have developed anti- content theft measures, including paywalls and watermarking, especially for premium content; other media outlets can’t afford this. Some creative radio stations in Kenya have come up with anti-plagiarism tools that allow editors and supervisors to detect pirated content.
Can countries like Kenya invest to ensure there is copyright protection of creative works, including journalistic work? The creation of original content/news is quite involved and expensive, and by stealing such content and sharing it, or manipulating it and, by extension, cheapening the content outside journalistic standards, the credibility of the journalists is tainted while media company brands are put in disrepute.
Media houses are using AI to maximise audience segmentation and preferences, thus gradually we are seeing a stabilisation of changes in ratings, trust and credibility in the media, as the industry finds footing in the fast -changing operating environment.
While there are many fears and street talk that the media industry is going down soon, people are mistaking the changing consumer patterns of audiences and changing content delivery approaches to mean that people are not interested in media anymore.
So, while newspapers may reduce circulation and radios and TVs lose listeners, people have not stopped reading or listening or watching news; what has changed is when, where and how they consume media content.
With huge leaps in technology, including the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation, which have allowed for breakthrough insights and applications that may truly change the world forever, media content gathering, production and dissemination have changed and altered things.
There are genuine fears that such innovations and related while making work easier will make many routine jobs obsolete in the media if fully embraced, it seems it’s the way to go. Such technological innovations might be the missing link to deal with things such as misinformation, copyright infringement, content theft and frustrations being encountered when monetising content by the media.
They will become our watchmen for our paywalls as we deal with people unwilling to pay for media content. The Television set in your house is just a platform, an irrelevant piece of electronics until content is fed into it.
That’s why the same television set has a million people watching one channel, and less than a hundred on another channel using the same TV set. The same applies to the radio receiver and internet. One website has four million hits while another has none. The difference is the content.
Our Copyright Act must be reviewed in these changed circumstances to enable it to respond to the new reality- balancing editorial, legal and commercial practices and intellectual property rights for the original content creators and news producers-they need recognition, money and ownership recognition in the news production process. To journalists, a byline is a lifeline-it gives them the right to earn money and the right to claim professional ownership of the content.
As Professor Ben Sihanya notes, the transmission of broadcasting has raised several questions relating to intellectual Property (IP), especially on digital copyright, trademark and the domain name system. In Kenya, such matters are protected and arbitrated under the Copyright Act 2001, but increasingly, people are seeking redress through the Media Council of Kenya because they are now addressed under the revised code of conduct for media practice in Kenya and the MCK guidelines for use of AI in the media.
In his article entitled “Media Law in Kenya in the era of digital migration in Kenya”, Prof Sihanya notes that a digital work is protected under copyright if the work is original and expressed in a tangible, material or fixed form. He notes that the Act implicitly defines originality in terms of “sufficient effort has been expended on making the work to give it an original character.” And tangibility refers to “work which has been written down, recorded or otherwise reduced to material form.”
Copyright law protects and promotes the expression of ideas, that is, information, facts, data, formulae, knowledge or concepts.
Copyright protects the intellectual and economic interests of creators, owners, assigns, (sub) licensees and publishers of literary, artistic, musical, and audio-visual works as well as Broadcast. Is this possible under the current environment with AI dominated content?
