Competing with AI

The rise of Artificial Intelligence presents a unique challenge for journalists: how to compete with machines created by humans to serve humans. This piece explores the evolving landscape of journalism in the AI era.

Older generations of journalists, who have largely retired, meticulously crafted their stories by hand. They wrote with pens on paper, ensuring their handwriting was legible. Editors then processed these manuscripts, followed by further review before typesetting. This deliberate process, involving multiple layers of editing and approval, ensured a thorough approach to reporting.

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AI is a product created by humans to serve humans, but the difficulty for humans is how to... compete with it.

While computers and the internet brought efficiency, some journalists maintained a "conservative" approach, preferring to write by hand. Their reasoning was that handwriting facilitated the "digestion" of material, allowing for deeper thought and integration of related information. This personal investment often resulted in a distinct "writing voice," making authors identifiable even without their bylines. However, this method was slow and increasingly unsuitable for the fast-paced nature of news.

The advent of the internet also introduced the temptation of "laziness," leading to copy-pasting. Early on, editors could easily detect these unoriginal passages, finding them jarring and indicative of a lack of responsibility to the reader. In the current AI era, the role of the journalist becomes even more critical. While machines excel at speed and data processing, human journalists are uniquely positioned to provide the essential context, emotion, empathy, and social responsibility that AI can never replicate, ensuring the creation of "original truth."

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In the AI era, the role of the journalist becomes even more important as they are the only ones who can create 'original truth.'