My colleagues and I are engaged in the convoluted, ever-shifting process of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in journalism in ways that are both productive and ethical. Somewhere between “Let students use AI to write their stories” and “We should forbid all uses of AI,” there is a reasonable approach, and we’re all trying to figure out what that is.
Our students learn from us. We learn from our students. Keep in mind, though, that we have not yet seen what you might call “AI natives” in our classrooms. Young people in their late teens and early 20s were part of the before times. In the not-too-distant future, though, we’ll start seeing students who can’t remember a world without ChatGPT, Claude and the rest.
Recently I devoted a class to AI in my graduate ethics seminar. It’s a small group of five students, one of whom is an advanced undergrad. I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am.
Read the rest at Poynter Online.
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The kids are alright.
This student nailed it: “…If you don’t have the time or creativity to put together an article or come up with a tweet on your own, then this might not be the field for you.”
Truth. However, the reality is upon all of us. It goes beyond doing more with a lot less; the public doesn’t want to pay for things, and yet demands more and more stuff be free. In fact, in general, we have all become accustomed to that on many different levels.
I have been noodling with AI, and I don’t find the output robotic, especially given how some news is produced.
Interestingly, I came across a guy who is basically taking my stories and having AI produce short audio bits of my content for his NH audio podcast feed with no attribution (he has a vast number of states created). It reminds me of the old days when WBZ radio would rip and read AP short drafts of Boston Globe content without attribution, and there was a big stink about it (I think it was Barnicle or Nyhan who wrote about this… I’m getting old). In my mind, this is even worse than that. It’s also worse than AI, helping some search for my posts. He’s stealing my work, repackaging it as his own, and making money off it. This is the danger… while at the same time, understanding we have a public that doesn’t want to pay for anything and thinks everything should be free.
Another good point: “…when someone is replaced with a computer, that’s a hard-working individual who’s spent their life getting to a point to be replaced.”
But the opposite could be said, too. Much of the advancement isn’t any different than spellcheck being built into MS Word or Grammarly or any other tool that helps a person be more productive. We are not at Terminator yet…
As always, an interesting piece. Thanks for sharing the experiment.