Is AI the end of journalism—or a fresh start?

One day, I heard that the major left-wing newspaper in town had re-tweeted one of my articles.

I was thrilled. It was about time someone recognized my talents, I thought.

I turned to the web page of the newspaper, which is quite influential politically. It can ride candidates to victory with an endorsement or throw them from their momentum with a hit piece.

I thought to myself, now I was going to join the ranks of the hot and popular newshounds.

It was true. My piece had been retweeted.

The writer who did so called it “hilarious.”

The hook

But what got me into trouble was another reporter from the newspaper who had weighed in with a jealous comment about my piece.

Her photo appeared next to her remark.

Curious, and not knowing what I was getting into, I looked her up on the website.

She was young, blonde, had her head thrown back in a look of utter disdain, and most importantly, her articles were trash-talking whoever she wrote about.

It was like her whole person, her face, and her writing style was saying: don’t even look at me, you worthless scum, I’m beyond even your wildest hopes and dreams and that gives me the right to trash you.

Hooked

Of course, I was curious.

She had an Instagram account, which I had never used, and she incited readers to look her up there.

I did. I couldn’t help myself. And only later did I learn, to my utter amazement and fear, that anyone who uses Instagram can be seen or recognized by the owner of the site.

But what I saw confounded me.

The first photo was of this young reporter in a bikini with her legs spread facing the camera. She was wearing a cowboy hat and dark glasses.

In another photo, she was wearing a ballerina’s outfit with her legs folded to the side and wings posted on her back.

I couldn’t believe a reporter would advertise herself in this way.

I thought this must be a younger generation of newstellers.

Journalism in the era of AI

But recently the New York Times has started to take a similar approach.

The venerable institution, indeed, does not show or link to photos of its journalists in bikinis.

But it’s getting close.

These days, many major news stories in the Times have videos of reporters talking to the reader personally, as it were.

Moreover, the Times is experimenting with videos of famous female actors throwing their hair back as they look up from a sullen gaze, directly at the reader.

These videos appear on the front page and do not require a click to start playing.

This is the new world of journalism in the era of artificial intelligence.

The challenge of AI

Artificial intelligence creates such a challenge to traditional forms of journalism and other forms of storytelling that both the New York Times and authors’ guilds are suing the companies that promote and create AI.

In the case of the Times, the lawsuit revolves around the undisputed fact that certain AI systems were trained on the database of past New York Times articles.

The Times calls this copyright infringement. But the AI companies say the material was in the public sector and so is subject to fair use.

But behind this simulacrum is a far deeper concern, it seems.

In one disturbing case, some Times newsroom leaders were present when Google put on a demonstration of how AI could help them write articles. The participants came away feeling deeply “unsettled,” according to the Times.

The real concern, of course, touching everyone in this industry, is: will AI replace journalism?

And to what extent has it already?

Competing with AI

Thus, we get experiments with journalists marketing themselves, or selling special access to them, or adding zany humor that AI—hopefully—might not be able to mimic.

I’d like to touch briefly on some of these experiments, and then propose other ways we, as journalists, might contend with the challenges posed by AI.

The subscription model

Take Axios, for example. The conservative-leaning online platform is breaking what it calls new ground with subscriber-based newsletters for those who pay more.

This will give hoo-has who are willing to fork over more dough instant access to journalists in the know.

But such tactics have been tried before.

A newsletter, called “The Correspondent,” sought to build a community by offering paid subscriptions to commentary by expert journalists.

It lasted several years—then took a nosedive.

The personality, or pundit, model

“The Free Press” and “The Weekly Dish” are driven by longtime personalities and analysts with vast credentials and smart takes on the news.

Bari Weiss parted from the New York Times to publish “The Free Press” when she said it was veering from the bedrock principles of journalism and being overtaken by radical progressive leftist ideology. She and Andrew Sullivan, who has had an even more illustrious career as a journalist and public intellectual, now publish their news sources online mostly through email subscriptions.

Still, while they offer cogent and breathtakingly new versions of current events, they are constrained by a lack of reporters in the field.

They usually refer to the New York Times as both foil and shield.

The eclectic model

Ben Smith, the current co-owner of “Semafor,” another online platform that seeks to drudge up subscriptions through emails, was once the media columnist for the New York Times.

Semafor’s approach seems to take witticism and eclectic humor as its mainstay.

Like tabloid news media, it blazons a tagline over each article with a pun or witticism.

Perhaps this is something that AI cannot do.

But some argue it might be able to do it in the future.

The unknown of AI-generated news      

Meantime, many local papers are closing. Nor is it clear how much news is already generated by AI.

Financial news services already extensively use AI to write news. Many have said so.

But how much is Yahoo News or news reports through other major internet servers exclusively produced by humans?

We have no way to tell.

In a recent disclaimer, Google admitted it was using generative AI to deliver “original content.” But it expressly stated it would “not claim” it.

The hate model

On the other extreme, you have the local left-wing paper with the young disdainful journalist who calls everyone names in her articles.

The tagline for her and her colleagues? “The writers you love to yell at.”

And true to form, a small community of hate and rage is built up in the comments section below her articles trashing her in the vilest terms.

It’s almost as if, with their words, all her readers are engaging in mud-wrestling with her. Gorges and gorges of hot, steaming filthy words come spewing out. They linger on the page, like gobs of hate and frustration, while her scornful picture looks down on them, as it were, in disdain.

This model seems to be working—and might perhaps work for a while—until perhaps she gets too old to fit this paradigm—or until bad actors get involved.

In the case of a colleague of hers, that is precisely what happened.

Another young, female reporter from the same paper, who reported on police officers involved in domestic violence, had dangerous comments of a different sort made on her feed. They were apparently by police officers who threatened to reveal her secrets.

The hybrid model

Public radio has yet tried another format, of buying up newspapers and incorporating reporters on air.

But public radio is shivering apart right now with scandals that it is too ideologically driven, and this experiment seems bound to crumble into ashes.

So where does this leave us—as journalists?

A proposal

Since AI relies on what has already been created and synthesizes from that, we must look outside the realm of what AI has access to.

In other words, there is no way to defeat AI except to choose those sources of inspiration that have been excluded from its databases.

For journalists, these are all the things we did not write about. These are all the things our editors excluded. These are all the things that went wrong with the story, as we were reporting it, that we left out.

Every journalist of decent character and experience has, for instance, “war stories” that never made it into print.

For some, these may simply amount to impressions, however fleeting, that remain with us as long after we report a story.

Images, longings, missed opportunities.

We must no longer adhere to the same old tired stories about the world.

Here is my proposal.

What was left out

Looking back on my career as a Newsweek correspondent in Asia, I never covered what I wanted to cover. The dictates were determined by editors who had gone to journalism school or who adhered to the traditions of journalism.

Thus, we covered wars, bombings, kidnappings, terrorism groups, plane crashes, disease outbreaks, elections, coups, suppression of religion, the stock market, pop stars, and other fatalities.

What we didn’t cover was—our adventures and impressions.

Why not write a story about the massive toenail I found in a bowl of spaghetti in Terengganu, Malaysia?

Why not write about my kidnapping in Guangzhou, China?

Or about the office secretary in Hong Kong and our fascination with her?

Or about the women sweeping up grain in the streets in Guangxi Province, China.

Or even about the time my editor handed me cash from an ATM in downtown Hong Kong and called me “son.”

What cannot be mimicked?

Since AI has been trained on traditional news stories, we must find the untraditional.

We must dive deep into those memories of ours that have never been put in print, release them, and find a way to build a story out of each one.

Only that will create something unique and new—and find us readers looking for the bizarre and singular—that which cannot be reproduced.

An example: China coverage

Let me give an example by way of closing out this article—which was intended only to be a start or a rallying cry.

Traditional coverage of China, for the past thirty years, boils basically down to the same point: China is our new enemy.

The same thirty or forty stories appear again and again like tiresome aunts and uncles coming over with a bottle of wine and cheese inviting themselves in to regale you with the same old tales exhaled with wheezy foul-smelling breath.

And yet, each time, you think it’ll be different. And it appears to be so—for a while.

Then you find, each of the same old stories is in fact just the same old story with different actors or under different guises.

In my day, it was the outbreak of disease, or corruption, or a military confrontation with the United States or another country, or something having to do with factories or prostitutes or golf courses, migrants or prisons.

The margins of experience

What I’m proposing is we start with the experiences that we never recorded as journalists, that we may not want to record, or were not assigned to record, and build a story from there.

What memories and experiences have we repressed because they didn’t fit the mold of everyday reporting?

As an example, I want to experiment with how I might have written an article about my kidnapping in China. Then compare it with an article written by AI about kidnapping in China, in general.

Part one: How I might have written an article about my kidnapping in China

There was this girl in the office, a photographer, who always wore short skirts, long leggings, and high boots to show off her terrific legs. She was, I suppose, one of those unattainable girls, or young women, I should say.

When my sister’s friend came to visit Hong Kong, he stopped by the Newsweek office to see me.

Stephanie was there—the girl with the leggings. Not knowing that this friend of my sister’s was gay—I’ll call him Flavius—she became enraptured by him.

Flavius was tall and lean. He had short blonde hair combed back in a wave riding up from his forehead.

He was very youthful. He gardened, and his passion for sticking his hands into the dirt and coaxing flowers out, seemed to give him something of the animation of a hothouse wildflower himself.

He was always on the verge of laughing, deep down in his throat, when he would squint up his eyes and flip his head back a little.

Flavius was confidential while being disillusioned.

Something was missing in him—he seemed a corn husk that rattled in the wind and had nothing inside except perhaps some dry, rattling seeds.

Yet this distant, empty, alluring quality of his seemed in a way to match that of Stephanie.

She was hurt, deeply, in some inconsolable way.

Her long legs in tights and her swatch of gorgeous hair that she swung around seemed like the motions of a tree laboring in the wind. You were never sure what was there.

She affixed upon him.

She hung upon his every word.

He toured our office, joked with her, and then he and I left.

She walked out with us to wish us goodbye.

“Dare I say farewell?” he said in parting.

He was a high school humanities teacher and the son of a Southern Baptist preacher.

“Let us never say farewell,” she said in mock but serious romance.

“A thousand, thousand,” he said, quoting the Tempest.

When we finally said goodbye, after she remained poised at the other end of the subway tunnel watching us go, I never thought to ask him why he didn’t tell her he was gay. He had kept up the pretense the whole time that he was straight.

Some months later, after I had been kidnapped, my editor called all the journalists and photojournalists to gather around and hear my story at a banquet.

Stephanie came, too.

But she was unmoved.

The last time I saw her was months later after she returned from a distant photo shoot.

She appeared to have aged remarkably.

“I’ve changed a lot, haven’t I?” she said.

I thought she must have undergone some sort of sickness.

But I never asked why.

Part two: How AI wrote about kidnapping in China in general

Prompt: write about kidnapping and China

Kidnapping is a very traumatic experience. Many Chinese have experienced kidnapping. We want to avoid being kidnapped. So we want to stay away from countries where kidnapping takes place.

Some say these countries include China. Others say kidnapping is more common in Mexico and South America. Regardless, we must take care to protect ourselves from being kidnapped.

One of the ways we may make sure we are not kidnapped is to never venture alone into unknown parts of a city. We ought to avoid dark streets, especially at nighttime. Children, and adults, too, ought to leave their phone numbers with loved ones to let them know how to reach them in case of harm.

It is a good idea, some say, to contact the police in a new city and find out where the dangerous parts of the city may be. We may also want to check in with our embassy if we are in a new country and ask about how to keep ourselves safe.

While being kidnapped is not fun and certainly can be very traumatic, we ought to remember that we can survive it like many others have. For instance, following instructions is very important. We ought not to try to escape, at all costs. Unless we are in imminent danger, it is better to follow the instructions of our kidnappers and behave decently.

In many cases, kidnappers want ransom money. So we ought to have credit cards with us at all times. In case we don’t have enough money to pay a ransom, we ought also to have contacts of wealthy relatives so that they can pay for us. Remember, you can survive if you have been kidnapped!

Part three: which article would you rather read?

Hint: neither was written by AI.

The end.