Are We the Future?

How Does AI Affect Journalism?

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Artificial intelligence (AI) became widely available to the public when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late November 2022. Since then, the concept of AI seems to be a harmless tool that is helpful in assignments, research and other practical uses. What a general amount of people fail to realize is that there is more to AI, as the uses are almost infinite, and the system has more knowledge then one can acquire throughout an entire lifetime.

“AI could be a useful tool for writing in the sense of generating ideas or giving you a summary of something,” English Department Chair Lee Norment said. “I think there are potential ways it could be useful. The difficulty with younger people is not training them in the ways of thinking and the ways of engaging with what they read, and skipping over that and allowing the tools to do all that work, that’s going to have some type of negative consequence for the kids in the long run.”

Since AI is becoming more readily used throughout various fields due to convenience, jobs such as journalism are heavily threatened when in competition with the powerful technology. With a journalist’s job being to write articles, typically to convey information, AI has become a large threat because of  the easy accessibility of knowledge it provides. Consequently, more search engine platforms are incorporating the use of AI into their search results. The popular search engine Google is one example of such a platform, with a 2022 study showing that half of AI overview searches were zero-click. Therefore, AI takes from audiences that might’ve instead gone to journalist articles and research. With no readers, journalist jobs are rapidly declining, with about 2.5 newspapers closing every week in 2023. If journalists are already being threatened by a technology that is not even fully developed, there is simply no knowledge of what the future of journalism could turn out to be. 

Other than just taking away audiences, AI is currently being used as a tool journalists use to write articles. This is because AI is often more efficient and convenient than manually writing hundreds of articles in order to cover the multitude of topics needed. As AI is being used and more depended on, journalists become less in demand. Over the past 20 years, the United States lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists. If AI continues to increase the decline of journalists, the fields of both journalism and writing will certainly need to change significantly to adapt to the technology.

“Learning how to write is supposed to be challenging, and it is supposed to help you develop the ways of thinking that will lead you to a more humane, thoughtful engagement to the world,” Norment said. “And so when you use AI, you’re jumping over all that work that should be helping you develop your thinking and ways of being as a student.”

Although the future of journalism may seem bleak since many organizations are already using AI, there are aspects of journalism that artificial intelligence simply cannot replicate yet. Physical investigations for information, such as interviews, photography and undigitized books are inaccessible to AI currently, and therefore human input is still highly necessary. AI can be a useful tool, but because it is designed to be practical and to the point, if it were to be consistently used throughout the field of journalism, it would rid the personal feel of human-written articles. 

“Obviously, as an English teacher, I believe that writing is extremely important,” Norment said. “Not only just practically and to be able to do it well, but also in the sense that it helps us express our humanity.”

Despite the fact that there is a bit of time before AI is advanced enough to get rid of journalism, it certainly still poses a large threat. Journalists and writers should refrain from using AI, or becoming dependent upon it, to reduce the risk of the technology replacing jobs and stripping the overall writings of character. When browsing, people should do more in-depth searches to not only provide an audience to journalist organizations, but to gain a deeper understanding of the topic, rather than relying on an AI summary.