The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer have been caught with egg on their faces after publishing a summer reading recommendation list that appeared to be full of Artificial Intelligence (AI) slop. The guide was full of both fake books and inauthentic authors, drawing much ridicule for both papers.

The Sun-Times later explained that the list was generated by a freelancer who apparently used AI. The paper said it was reviewing content they publish from partners and that they are “committed to making sure this never happens again.”

But in a world where anyone anywhere can create a feature-length article in seconds using AI, this might be easier said than done. Just as the media was caught with its pants down by the advent of the Internet — and how digital advertising blew up their funding model — AI risks upending the industry once again.

It’s not all bad. AI as a tool can be useful for things like helping reporters research topics that require laborious diving through databases and Google searches. If I wanted to, for instance, find out New York City’s population in 1960, I would be more than justified going to ChatGPT for an initial query.

But AI’s potential — and danger — goes far further than that, of course. If you go into one of these services and ask it to produce a column in the style of, say, Thomas Friedman, it will do so extremely well. That means that the possibility that AI could replace human labour for all manner of journalistic products — from op-eds to travelogues to movie reviews — is very real.

But currently a major problem is when AI is used without the knowledge of the reader. Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer are just the latest examples. In 2023, Sports Illustrated faced heavy criticism after it was revealed that the magazine had published product review articles attributed to fictitious authors with AI-generated headshots and biographies. For instance, “Drew Ortiz” was described as an outdoors enthusiast, but his profile photo was found on a website selling AI-generated images.

The impact on news outlets could be just as devastating, if not more so, than the rise of the Internet and digital advertising. Wide swaths of papers like The New York Times — which makes a ton of revenue from its games and cooking sections — could be replaced by an army of data centre-fuelled artificial general intelligence products.

So how can the press better prepare itself for this tidal wave? One avenue where the robots still don’t best journalists is in pure reporting. An AI programme might be able to mock up an excellent opinion essay, but it will have a much harder time getting in the car and driving down to Main Street to talk to people about how they feel about the latest big development in town.

The advent of the Internet created a sort of opinion economy where clickbait and ragebait often drove readers to online outlets. But the rise of AI could prompt the press to get back to the basics.

In order to survive the AI revolution, journalists need to return to first principles. Only we can step up and tell the Who, What, When, Where, and Why about the kinds of human stories that drew people to newspapers in the first place. Let AI handle the slop — and we’ll handle the stories.

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Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

ZaidJilani

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