Debate, Bergen | Here, Bergen is number 1

Opinions This is a debate post. The post expresses the writer’s views.

“What the **** is it with Bergen? Are you the center of the universe or something?’, asked an American from the media giant CNN.

It was not an insult aimed at the Bergens’ self-image, but an expression of genuine astonishment at everything that happens in the media and media technology city of Bergen.

The fact that people wonder what’s in the water in Bergen is due to one simple reason: not only are we the number 1 media technology city in Norway, but we also deliver at the top of the world.

It has not come by itself.

In 1991 took the state a clear position, and said that the country’s first commercial broadcaster (TV 2) should be located outside Oslo. Between the seven mountains, people had to reinvent the TV industry, without the traditions of the established NRK.

What followed was pioneering and a thriving technological environment. The budding around this environment has no parallel in Norwegian technology history.

Many of the companies based in Bergen now have customers all over the world. If you turn on a TV on holiday, there is a high probability that the graphics in the news broadcast are made by Vizrt, that the cameras in the studio are controlled by Electric Friends and the broadcast is produced with the program Dina from the Fonn Group, to name three quick examples.

The media city of Bergen continues to set speed and direction. Recently, the Media Cluster was awarded NOK 10 million by Agenda Vestlandet for Project Reynir. In this project, we bring together the media industry, technology companies and academia in the fight against fake news online.

Generative artificial intelligence, which allows people to create realistic – but fake – images and videos just by typing a few words into a text box, is causing trouble for the position of truth online. Never before has it been easier to create content that looks good but is fake.

Artificially generated noise makes the world’s problems worse. If we become further uncertain about what we can trust, we lose our power to act to do something about climate change, war or economic instability.

The core of Project Reynir is to strengthen the signal of the credible sources in a sea of noise. For those of you who read news on your mobile every day, the end product will be both a solution that makes it possible to examine for yourself how an image was created and what has been done with it before it arrived on your mobile screen. In addition, you get a visual confirmation that the article in the Facebook feed is actually from BA, and not someone pretending to be them.

Here in Bergen, we simply go to the front to solve world problems, and we get partners such as Microsoft, the BBC and The New York Times in the same room as the Norwegian Schibsted, TV 2 and NRK.

However, everything is not hurt well.

Paradoxically, or perhaps quite typically, Bergen and the people of Bergen are not good enough to speak out loud about what we achieve here in the city. Therefore, relatively few people actually know that Bergen is a leading international media technology city.

More people need to open their eyes to the value creation that takes place here.

That Bergen has this position is not a coincidence, but the result of persistent work that began after the state was clear, and bet on Bergen at the time just over 30 years ago.

Now it is time to press again.

Let’s take the technology being developed in Project Reynir as an example. This is not only useful for the media industry. Anyone who is interested in the fact that recipients of information can trust who is the sender benefits from this.

Other parts of society should adopt this technology. For example, the White House and Joe Biden have signaled that they will use this type of technology to secure their communications to the population.

Surely it is important to be sure that information from Bergen municipality or the government actually comes from them?

Here the state should join the team. State authorities, directorates and large public institutions will greatly benefit from this type of technology.

My clear appeal to Culture Minister Lubna Jaffery and Digitization Minister Karianne Tung is therefore this: Support an initiative that exists and works! The state was exemplary clear in 1991. Now they must be clear again, to consolidate Bergen as Norway’s sunny capital for media technology.