· Driven by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, the plan works in key areas such as Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence or Data.
· This initiative is aligned with the regulation and best practices in self-regulation being promoted by the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) to protect the freedom and pluralism of European media.
In the framework of the Democracy Action Plan, the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service has decided to grant grants of 6.49 million euros to 18 projects for the integration of artificial intelligence in media value chains. This line of grants, on a competitive basis, is one of the four measures of the Aid Plan for the Digitalisation of the Media which was approved last December by the Council of Ministers, with an allocation of 124.5 million euros.
The objective of this initiative, which acts in key areas such as Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence or Data, is to digitally strengthen the media and communication sector, to preserve its competitiveness and to offer truthful information to citizens, as stated in article 20.1 of the Spanish Constitution. In this way, it aims to facilitate that the media that base their business model on providing society with plural and truthful information, take advantage of the opportunities and face the challenges presented by the technological and digital wave.
Spain thus joins the trail of European countries that have supported their private media to strengthen democracy. This grant program is aligned with the self-regulation standards and best practices being promoted by the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) to protect the freedom and pluralism of European media.
This line of aid is convened by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence within the framework of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2024, promoted with European funds from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. The aim is to finance AI integration projects (in the experimental development phase) in the media value chain of the publishing sector. It is aimed at large or medium-sized companies with publications of supraautonomic circulation, in more than 2 autonomous communities, that certify paper publication, either daily or periodic, and that also have an associated digital medium.
Applications that beneficiaries can develop include:
- Fact-checking: tools to identify and combat fake news.
- Content personalization: systems that adjust the news to the interests and needs of the user.
- Moderation of comments: solutions to manage interactions on websites and social networks.
- Indexing, metadata and content search: including techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation.
- Transcription and accessibility: advanced systems that facilitate inclusion and access to information.
- Generation of summaries: tools to simplify texts and make news more accessible.
- Other innovative AI applications that strengthen the media business model.
Reinforcement in key areas such as Data
The Media Digitisation Support Plan is also moving forward with measures to strengthen innovation based on data sharing, where grants worth 5.74 million euros have already been implemented for 9 media projects, adding the calls for demonstration centres and use cases and for products and services of data spaces. Likewise, until December 31, the media will be eligible for loans, with a total value of 19.5 million euros, to develop digitization projects and co-official languages managed by the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT).