Can Journalism retain its Soul in the Age of AI?

 Can Journalism retain its Soul in the Age of AI?

The byline is a name of a human being, but the original version was written by a machine. Investigative report goes through millions of documents within hours, which was not possible. The local news site has ten times the volume with same skeletal staff. It is not a hypothetical situation; it is the current situation in newsrooms across the globe with the implementation of artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT into the field of journalism. The potential is vast: effectiveness, size, and opening up new possibilities of narrative. However, as the industry runs towards this mighty technology, a deeper, more critical ethical question arises: What becomes of the principles of journalism, truth, responsibility, and trust in the community when the process is now reliant on a non-human and opaque artificial intelligence? The level of adoption is overwhelming. An international survey commissioned by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, in 2023, reported that close to half of the leaders of news organizations are actively adopting AI in their newsgathering operations. More than three-quarters of editors currently perceive the key benefit of generative AI in increasing productivity in repetitive work. Earnings reports have been automated by media giants such as the Associated Press over the years, and now sports recaps, real-time translators, and dense document summarers are being written by tools. The financial strain cannot be disputed. Since 2008, newsroom jobs in U.S. have declined 26 percent (Pew Research Center), AI can be seen as a financial savior of a crisis-stricken industry.

However, this life-buoy is attached with currents of treachery. The initial ethical whirlpool is the deception of objectivity. AI models are not an oracle, they are a reflection of the enormous oceans of information, both human biases and lies, on which they are trained. According to a widespread myth, AI is neutral, and Dr. Meredith Broussard, the author of Artificial Unintelligence, is indeed correct. In fact, it can be systematically used to increase the prejudices of society. A journalist who uses AI to assist verify court records may inadvertently cause racial differences in the data on policing, in case the training data reflected such trends. The attempt to find one, algorithmic truth is liable to undercut the journalism profession of blending various and opposing human interpretations. It directly brings to the second, and possibly the most serious threat the undermining of accountability and transparency. In the event that an AI tool hallucinates a fact, a well-known weakness in which models produce convincing information that is entirely fake, who is to bear the blame? The programmer, the writer, or the publisher? The chronology of a narrative is lost. The technology news outlet CNET had no choice but to make numerous corrections in a high-profile embarrassment after its quietly published AI-generated financial explainers had gross mistakes. The case was a lesson: in the absence of radical transparency, there is no room to trust. In case readers fail to differentiate between the content produced by humans and that produced with the help of AI, the covenant of trust on which journalism is based is violated.

Moreover, the dark side of economic efficiency AI will bring is the loss of journalistic labor and loss of institutional memory. Routine tasks could be automated and this could help save money but it could also lead to the hollowing out of a profession. It has been in the curation of a police blotter or a sports local result, the apparently trivial-minded, that young journalists have traditionally been trained to learn what accuracy, brevity and context in the community entail. When these entry points disappear, on whom does the new generation of investigative reporters practice their skills? Worse still, since newsrooms will use AI to filter information and provide a recommendation on how to approach the story, the invaluable instinct of the experienced editor with his gut feeling, sense of ethics, and understanding of the history of a community can be eroded. And, maybe, the most insidious danger is that to journalism, which is all about empathy, nuance and putting power to the test. Artificial intelligence is excellent at the idea of recognizing a pattern that happened in the past, but it cannot reside in the living room of a parent gripping the outcome of loss, feel the faltering of a voice in a position, or make the ethical decision on how to safeguard a frail source. It does not have a clue about the cultural sensitivity of a local conflict or the deep-seated human outcomes of a policy choice. Be careful not to begin to report on the kind of world that is sorted with ease by algorithms and not the messy human stories that require a human touch, as Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center of Digital Journalism in Columbia, cautions. Seeking clicks and AI-enhanced content may direct the coverage towards less important but difficult to report matters such as corruption in the city or rot in the institution. The question is where is the way forward in relation to ethics? It does not reject, but integrates, strictly, on the bases of principle.

To begin with, human supervision should not be compromised. AI ought to be considered as the most brilliant and at the same time the most gullible intern in the room. Each fact that it creates has to be confirmed, each assertion has to be traced back, and each situation has to be evaluated by a human editorship. There must be a nominated individual to whom the ultimate responsibility should always be. Second, radical transparency must be in place. The news organizations have to establish and publicly implement evident disclosure standards. The Guardian has started applying the term AI-assisted to suitable content. The readers are entitled to find out when and how AI has been applied in reporting and creating a story. Third, there is no time to underinvest in human journalists as before. The proceeds of AI automation ought to be reinvested into the distinctively human capabilities that the machines cannot possess: investigative journalism, insidious analysis, deep beat reporting, and moral editing. The idea is not just to make journalism low-end but rather to make it higher. The use of AI in journalism is unavoidable. The question of whether it will become an instrument that can help to raise the profession to the utmost ideals or an instrument that can erode even the foundation of the profession is one that editors, reporters, and publishers are making today. The algorithms are not going to decide what is ethical to us. After all, it is not the complexity of our silicon that helps us to create an information ecosystem that remains honest, but rather the conviction, the boldness and the humanness of our reporters. Automation of the soul of the profession is yet to come, but certainly on the clock.