Six weeks ago, I found myself utterly, unequivocally bored of a Saturday night. With no plans to go out, I made a cup of tea, settled myself under a blanket and checked openings for trainee journalism jobs (please, try to contain your jealousy). What I discovered was surprising, but not shocking: a post for an AI-assisted reporter at The Herald in Glasgow.
Had I been writing this article five years ago, perhaps it would feel like more of a bolt from the blue. Although the concept of machine intelligence has been around since the 1950s, it has only really become commonplace in recent years. ChatGPT was created in 2022, and now you’d be hard-pressed to find an educational institution that doesn’t have an artificial intelligence policy. According to a recent Times survey, 20 percent of UK secondary school pupils use AI for their homework.
It’s no secret that AI has been slowly creeping into the corporate world too (and, in some cases, taking it over entirely). A blatant example that comes to mind is a collection of AI-generated Coca-Cola adverts, released to the public in November 2024. These Christmas commercials sparked outrage amongst those of us who found the lack of human input both obvious and disturbing.
And now it seems to have infiltrated journalism, too. Introduced by companies such as Newsquest (who own almost 30 UK daily newspapers), AI has been involved in local newsrooms since 2023.
For now, it is being utilised as nothing more than an assistant; a helper. A handy device.
The role of an AI-assisted reporter is to use a ChatGPT-esque copywriting tool to input basic, trustworthy content. The software then transforms this information into a news report. At the heart of it, its purpose is to free up human reporters to take on the bigger, juicier stories that AI cannot possibly tackle.
One of the first local newspapers to introduce AI was Berrow’s Worcester Journal in June 2023.
Stephanie Preece, Worcester News Editor, said of the adjustment: “AI can’t be at the scene of a crash, in court, in a council meeting, it can’t visit a grieving family or look somebody in the eye and tell that they’re lying. All it does is free up the reporters to do more of that. Instead of shying away from it, or being scared of it, we are saying AI is here to stay – so how can we harness it?”
I don’t explicitly disagree with any of this. In fact, I think that the more time local reporters have to concentrate on the big stories, the better. Council minutes, details of a court hearing and even whole news stories can be written up quickly and efficiently with the help of AI.
Local journalism has long-suffered a lack of circulation, funding, and jobs. So if AI can assist with the writing up of primarily quantitative articles, allowing the few journalists who are available to report on more complex issues, how can it be a bad thing?
Granted, there doesn’t seem to be much of an issue at present. If anything, I think that certain properties of AI are proving extremely beneficial to the newsroom – its ability to process information in mere seconds, for example. Yet I still have cause to worry.
What I wonder about is the relationship between the future of local journalism and AI, as well as how far its role as assistant goes. We’ve already seen artificial intelligence infiltrate other professional fields to the point of human extinction; what if it slowly but surely phases out journalists, too? AI can source information on the Internet. It can create narratives. It can write articles.
Despite this, artificial intelligence doesn’t quite stack up to human standards. You can usually tell when something has been written by AI; it tends to be quite repetitive, generic and overly formal. This may work for short news reports, but the day that it begins to write up opinion pieces or interviews is the day that we should all start panicking. As Preece says, AI is here to stay. It’s pretty much inevitable that it was going to wind up in the newsroom. As an aid? Fine. As anything more? Not so much.
Now, I am not suggesting that AI is on track to replace reporters altogether – not for the time being, anyway. It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do so. Yes, it can write articles to a decent standard. No, it cannot investigate, or speak to people, or ask the big important questions.
Personally, I can’t picture a newsroom void of humanity (there is a joke to be made here). As long as curiosity pervades, journalists will exist. I hope the same goes for their writing.
