Journalists Face an Identity Crisis With AI
Will ChatGPT and other AI tools make reporters obsolete?
Will generative AI replace journalists? Many in the business think so, if preventative measures are not taken. Others say it’s a tool for brainstorming and increased productivity. In June, Insider listed media roles (including journalism) as one of the top 10 fields that may soon be replaced by AI, emphasizing that mid-career, mid-ability workers will be the first on the chopping block.
There’s no question that large language model-based chatbots like ChatGPT, while notoriously imperfect in their fact-checking, can write more quickly than a journalist with a beating heart. Humans have limitations in the form of attention bandwidth, processing speed and fingers. In the time it has taken to formulate and type the previous sentence, a well-worded prompt to ChatGPT could have generated a less biased article with an infinitely broader frame of references, if the software’s training data were up to date (it’s currently limited to September 2021). Once updated, chatbots can mine data from this very article to generate an arguably better one, using this exact writing style if prompted.
But perhaps the most startling revelation is that citations are not required. Copyright law currently allows the scraping of massive amounts of data…
