Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of technology that has recently become part of public conversation. Discussions on AI often center around the impact it could have on human labor, particularly in creative fields like journalism. This topic has been highlighted recently, with OpenAI examining the potential of their language processing AI, ChatGPT, in the field. OpenAI’s model has been tested on tasks such as writing poetry and opinion pieces, as demonstrated by Lori Falce, who chatted with ChatGPT to see what it could do for journalism.
Humans have enthusiastically embraced innovation for centuries. Through pioneering technology such as the first space shuttle, people are now able to access and use incredibly intricate technologies in the form of a mere candy bar. Unfortunately, with each wave of innovation comes labor displacement, which has made some more secure, complex jobs appear safe from this pattern — until the invention of AI, that is. AI has significantly transformed the capacity of machines to do work that was previously only possible with human effort, including in the fields of journalism, music, visual art, writing, and more.
This was demonstrated when Falce asked ChatGPT to write her a poem about news. The AI was able to generate relevant-sounding lines in seconds that could easily have been written by an English class student. Falce then asked ChatGPT to draft an op-ed on the topic of sports and politics. Its response was a series of coherent sentences and paragraphs, yet lacked the more subtle elements that can truly bring an opinion piece to life.
Falce also tested the AI’s capacity for making decisions and taking a position on matters. In this, though it was able to generate a statement accurately explaining the qualities of rubies, it was still unable to account for the fact that sapphires, too, have a hardness of nine on the Mohs scale. However, the model was quick to acknowledges its mistake, which proves that it is still very much in a state of learning.
Based on these tests it is evident that AI has potential to be an aid to journalists in certain aspects, as it can be faster and more efficient in certain tasks. However, AI language models do not possess the same instinct and cognitive capacities that humans have. As such, these models will never completely replace creative writers and journalists, although they may serve to make the writing process more efficient and effective.
