AI’s Promise and Pitfalls

Are journalists up for blazing the trail that makes AI work for the good of the public?

The public reception of ChatGPT reminds me of how seasoned journalists, including myself, reacted to the Internet when it first surfaced in newsrooms years ago.

Many of us rejected the new technology and the new business model that continues to devour the newspaper industry’s former monopoly on local advertising. At the time, the conventional wisdom held that Internet journalism and its adherents produced inferior news, undermined cherished journalistic values, and threatened something we all loved — the American newspaper. The conventional wisdom contained a kernel of truth. It always does.

But the groupthink that the journalistic establishment embraced was misleading. The Internet didn’t cripple American newspapers. What doomed newspapers wasn’t the Internet, it was the way many journalists and publishers reacted to the Internet. We failed to see the new technology’s potential to enhance storytelling and create timely new content-based news and information strategies. The result of this myopia: plummeting advertising earnings and a news industry limping into the future facing an existential threat. The American newspaper is now a shell of itself.

I see a similar phenomenon percolating in the reception to a range of technological innovations surrounding artificial intelligence or AI, shorthand for things like machine learning and large language models that make ChatGPT nearly synonymous with Google or the iPhone. I hear and read much about how AI and ChatGPT will kill jobs, not just in journalism but across the American workplace. AI’s impact no doubt will be felt beyond the newsroom floor, where publishers now shutter local newspapers at the rate of two a week. The threat to jobs from aggressive AI expansion could extend to everyone from law and accounting firms to educators, radiologists, tax preparers, writers, authors, and others.

A recent University of Pennsylvania study said artificial intelligence will eventually impact eighty percent of jobs in America.

The study didn’t predict all these jobs would go away. Many could be scaled back or diminished by the philosopher kings of Silicon Valley, who destroy industries as adeptly as they improve them.

One of the major challenges the nation faces with AI expansion: the current absence of independent oversight. The technology’s blazing pace of growth recently motivated more than 1,000 technological heavyweights such as Elon Musk to call for a pause so guardrails could be erected to protect the public from AI’s worst threats. The technology enables bad actors to efficiently spread misinformation and lies, just as polarized Americans brace for a new round of elections. Italy recently banned future development of AI, a move that could be a precursor to similar steps by the European Union.

Musk and company seem to have good intentions. But I don’t think anyone should reflexively reject this powerful new technology the way journalists originally reacted to the Internet. I doubt China or Russia will honor any pledge to pause AI expansion simply because American tech giants propose a halt. Some people will lose jobs, no question about that, either. New technologies always kill (and create) jobs, and I don’t see anything on the horizon that will reverse that trend. But ChatGPT and its evolving iterations could also provide opportunities and help liberate Americans from the worst practices of capitalism.

I’m focusing on journalism because journalists could be the among the first in line to feel the bad or good impact of AI. It’s worth asking if Chat GPT can inflict much more damage to the ranks of news reporters than traditional bosses. Publishers have already sacked at least 40,000 journalists over the last fifteen or twenty years, mainly at local newspapers, the backbone of the media for decades.

NASA

There’s another side to this. AI’s vulnerability to misinformation creates a crucial and growing need for skeptical, independent journalists. AI and its technological cousins could provide new tools for journalists to fill this need more effectively, efficiently, and better than ever if journalists embrace it and don’t react the way many initially did to the introduction of the Internet.

AI places powerful and transformational tools within the grasp of reporters. Can these new tools create a new business model for individual journalists – independent news entrepreneurs free from the cash hungry newspaper chains and hedge funds leading the charge to diminish news reporting, particularly on the local level? Can we instead create individual reporters who can use AI to cover local news free of the bottom-line constraints imposed by corporate journalism? The challenge is not as daunting as it might seem. Now is the time to push for a version of ChatGTP that places all public records at the fingertips of the public, which is as it should be.

For example, suppose we could put a courthouse public record ChatGTP database in the hands of an individual news entrepreneur covering a jurisdiction of several towns, each with a population of 20,000, a size close to the median city in America. He or she could publish a report on Substack, where writers can create and manage their own newsletters or publications. Assume the journalist charges subscribers $10 a month, or $120 a year. The individual news entrepreneur would need about 500 subscribers to earn $60,000 a year. Depending on which yardstick you use for the median salary of an American journalist these days, that’s a premium of about 15 to 20 percent above the going rate that a journalist typically earns.

A reporter can get copyediting – grammar and spellcheck — that is getting better by the day from AI. Substack, which takes a small cut of the revenue, provides a range of tools to help writers build audience and monetize content, including payment processing, subscriber management and marketing. A wide range of platforms eager for good content exist. Remember, most journalists are not trying to get rich, they just require a living wage so they can effectively report and not just regurgitate content that already exists.

I’m well aware of the promise and pitfalls of AI. The hypothetical example I refer to above becomes much more of a challenge when reality comes into play. How do we ensure that the public has free and open access to public records, be they in a local courthouse, city hall, the state legislature, the police station or the courts? Many governments already have open record laws on their books but just try to get your hands on police reports, sensitive lawsuits, zoning applications and so on. You’d be amazed at barriers to open records erected by politicians of all parties and persuasions.

I’ll also acknowledge that getting anyone to pay for the news, particularly local news, remains a huge challenge. Recruiting 500 people to subscribe to a Substack newsletter might sound easy. That’s just a fraction of the population of a cluster of towns of 20,000. I co-founded a non-profit news cooperative in Chicago about fourteen years ago and asked people to pay $2 a week for journalism that was also published in the nation’s best newspaper — the New York Times. We sought enough money simply to hire more journalists at modest salaries. We never fully reached the number of readers we needed. We finally used the cooperative to engineer the takeover of a newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, which is still publishing, although it’s now a non-profit. If you think it’s easy to solicit money to finance coverage of news and important public affairs issues, talk to National Public Radio.

In any case, a human editor would be needed, too, regardless of Silicon Valley’s assurances that the technology is as good as one with flesh and blood. There’s the growing challenge of training good, diverse journalists in solid journalistic techniques and practices. Many other problems exist.

Journalists are problems solvers, though, and worthy local journalism efforts are underway around the country. But none have achieved the scale needed to save local journalism from the existential threat it faces. I think the idea of an individual news entrepreneur armed with AI is a plausible alternative to the cratered news landscape created by newspaper chains and hedge funds. All we’ll get with them is more news deserts.

Silicon Valley companies such as Open AI, the technological force behind Chat GPT, envision a utopian world that frees the public from work. I have a more down-to-earth idea: Use the technology to create a world that truly gives journalists free and no-holds-barred access to information and public records. We should explore the potential of AI and not shun it for its shortcomings. We should lead the charge to make AI work for the pubic. It’s a challenging idea, but in the words of FDR, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.