The willingness to be surprised is a trait I’ll never appreciate enough. Three weeks ago, I attended a public meeting to update a story I’m working on. I arrived a few minutes earlier, greeted some participants and found a seat at the back of the room. As the meeting began and I started taking notes (pen and paper), a man sitting behind me tapped me on my shoulders. “Are you a reporter?” he whispered.
I’ve always thought the best part of being a journalist is meeting new people and learning from them. Building connections instead of relying solely on our computers to find sources, story ideas and the problems the audience deserves to know about.
As AI reshapes different industries, including journalism, workers are invited to decide when and to what extent to use its tools. I recently tried a few and even picked those I now call my “favorite” ones. But in trades that require creativity and critical thinking (as I’ve seen in more job posts than I can remember), relying too much on technology can jeopardize professionals’ ability to work in teams, develop novel ideas and make an impact, according to specialists.
But how much is too much?
Some context
Data scientist Chris Cahill compares the current AI boom to the discussions about big data and its implications for business and marketing in the early 2000s and to the time when spreadsheet software became popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
“It didn’t put bankers out of business,” said Cahill, founder of Pierian Analytics and a senior lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. “It didn’t turn banks into just automated spreadsheets.” He believes that, as with other technologies, AI will be integrated into workers’ skill sets.
When it comes to creative work and building new ideas, he is more skeptical. He said AI, like many marketing models, is good at finding a center of distribution. In other words, it uses information from the past to find what he calls “the mean.” That’s what happens when, while using AI to polish our writing, we receive suggestions that follow a similar pattern (many adjectives and a few cliché expressions, for example). “In the creative space, I don’t think we’re defined by the mean,” Cahill said. “What distinguishes the best journalists and creative artists are those who push beyond the training and chart a new path that people find compelling.”
When to use AI?
According to Ignacio Fernandez Cruz, an assistant professor at the School of Communication at Northwestern University, literacy is the first thing people need before deciding which tools to use and how often to use them. “If you know how the tool works and you have a mental schema of how it operates, you’re more likely to use it in a way that satisfies your needs,” said Cruz, who specializes in the impact of AI technologies on today’s workforce.
Like Cahill, he also believes context and experience are essential when creating solutions or making important decisions. “Novel ideas come from conversation, from collaboration,” he said. “From looking at the past but also thinking about design for the future.”
In a 2022 study, he found that people working under time constraints are more likely to use an intelligent assistant and rely less on their teams than those working under regular conditions. That made sense to me. But then, as a journalist, I thought of the many times my instructors at journalism school encouraged me and my colleagues to share anything that concerned us about our stories with the class. We were working under tight deadlines. Still, when afflicted, we resorted to people, not machines.
For journalists, AI might be beneficial for tasks like data gathering and document analysis. But maybe idea generation and writing should be done in a more old-school way.
The power of human connections
Cahill told me interesting ideas come from being “more in the world and less on the computer screen,” which brought me back to that community meeting a few weeks ago.
The man tapped my shoulder, asking me if I was a reporter, and I answered yes. I handed him my notepad, and we briefly exchanged phone numbers. “I’ll call you,” he whispered. He had important things to tell.
