03 - Artificial Intelligence in Journalism - Isaiah Calvert

 

    With the rise in popularity and use of AI it is inevitable that it will be integrated into journalism. I think that it is important going forward that we use AI to aid in journalism and not take it over. I think that would be detrimental to the field, and I'm going to go over a few reasons why. This is a story from a journalism student in his second year of graduate school  "There has been a growing discomfort among both students and faculty regarding how professional writers are meant to compete against fast, efficient language models that do not require time off, benefits, or empathy. My courses have started assigning exercises specifically designed to acquaint students with ChatGPT. One asked that we paste rough drafts of our theses into the language model and ask the AI to evaluate the working product. Students voiced collective discomfort with this assignment, due to language models’ murky privacy policies: my peers worried OpenAI would feed off our developing research to improve its mechanisms and possibly distribute portions of our findings to other users"(CollegeContemperary.com). I think this is a very real concern of AI stealing real people's work since that's the only way it gets it's information. I also think that this is especially relevant to us since this story comes from a college student and we are also college students, we need to be careful what information we share with AI. 

    News networks are being extra vigilant to make sure no one thinks they are using AI to write their articles for example The New York Times said "We don’t use A.I. to write articles, and journalists are ultimately responsible for everything that we publish."(New York Times). They felt they needed to say this because people were worried that what they were reading might not have been written by humans, and that is a very scary thing for a lot of people because it raises the risk of false information, because AI is not perfected yet, not by a long shot. AI makes countless mistakes and cannot be relied upon to do the job of a journalist. A lot of big news networks don't use AI to fully write articles; they use it for things like analyzing large databases, improve efficiency, and automating mundane tasks. 

    AI is also responsible for a lot of the deepfakes and fake news articles we see on social media, which goes back to our last assignment about misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. Because of some of this fake AI news that has been coming out recently, it has corroded people's trust in media, which again is a detriment to news in general, because instead of trying to decipher what is real and what is fake, people will stop looking at news altogether, and will end up less informed, which is really bad. Also if some news sources start relying on AI too heavily it will end up replacing some journalist jobs, which is beyond bad, this isn't just the case with Journalism, but AI is threating to replace a lot of jobs, just because company's are too money hungry to pay people what they are owed, and they are too willing to get a robot to do someone's job. 

    I know I have pretty much only talked about the bad parts of AI in journalism, and while I do agree that it is mostly bad, or at least has the potential to be really bad. It can be used to help with some mundane tasks like data analysis and improving efficiency. I think these are fine uses of AI. It is totally okay to be used in journalism as long as it is heavily monitored, and news companies don't rely on it too heavily. I think we can use classes like this to get a good understanding of how it can be used in journalism, so in the future, when we all get jobs, we can use AI to an appropriate level.

    Just to wrap up, I think that AI is a very helpful tool, and I even think that it can be used in journalism appropriately.  But as I said earlier, it has to be monitored. I think this video from (NBCU Academy) perfectly says how they can coexist. I look forward to seeing where AI ends up in the future because it is still in its beginning stages, it virtually has no limit. As long as we use it correctly, there's no telling how it will improve journalism in the future