There are not many working days left until the seasonal holidays, but I managed to squeeze in a small trip to the Baltics in my schedule. UNESCO invited me to be a keynote speaker at a multidisciplinary conference on artificial intelligence (AI). The partners were also the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations Security Council, the Baltic Engagement Centre for Combating Information Disorders and IREX.

It is always a pleasure to visit the Baltic countries. They are aesthetically intense, both when it comes to beautiful scenes and less eye-pleasing details. Amazing details of architecture, crafts and coziness intermix with the coldness of buildings that have seen their best days and often stem from the former Soviet days. Against this backdrop of visual contrasts, I find it intriguing to discuss with academics who have a very special mental outlook on the past and the present – largely different but still with so much similarities with our cultures in Finland and Scandinavia.

Nordic-Baltic collaboration is important for both parties and can enrich our perspectives in Scandinavia. Within the field of media and information literacy research, we can conduct interesting empirical work and draw meaningful conclusions from these countries that are living next to Russian influence operations and provide multilinguistic settings for examining the role of media and media cultures among minority and majority societies.

One interesting dimension in these visits is that you become awareness of time. Each time you return you can realize how things have changed, and how you yourself have changed – for example, discovered new areas or questions of research, such as AI.

I have been part of an annual summer school in cultural journalism for almost a decade now, and have had the opportunity to discover Riga, Cesis and Liepaja, but the city of this time’s visit was new to me. Valmiera hosts a university college that is running a Master’s programme in media and information literacy, medijpratība, which made this small town particularly interesting to add to my Latvian destinations.

A couple of weeks ago I also gave a keynote on AI in journalism education to Kyiv, and before that, to the Philippines, but these were both – quite understandably – virtual occasions. My lecturing tour related to the topics of journalistic-professional AI literacy, academic AI literacy and AI citizenship (also referred to as the general public AI awareness) will most likely continue next year, when I will hopefully complete our textbook on AI in newsrooms together with my colleague Jenny Wiik, and find time to produce the next NordMedia Network Open Educational Resource about AI in academic writing and editing.

Why AI? The field of AI combines and restructures my research interests and practical pedagogical experiences from previous years very nicely. It is, first and foremost, an issue of media and information literacy, which necessitates understandings of a special form of production or produsage competency. Second, it presents a creative practical and pedagogical opportunity that is very similar to my educational activities related to the uses or social media in the contexts of teaching or pedagogy and journalistic practice. Third, it deals with individuals’ technological relationship that has always interested me, even in the context of studies of cultural journalism and reviewing that both reflect upon the importance of creating a critical distance to an object of inquiry, regardless of whether this object is an artwork or an item of technology. All these perspectives that I am carrying along are needed to complement the technology- and technocratically-driven discourses that derive from computer and data sciences, the original home disciplines of AI.