AI and journalism: from now on, no support wheels

KI and journalism: From Now On Without Training Wheels Young people today live with artificial intelligence, whether they want to or not. Yet skepticism is growing. Two young journalists share their experiences. Helm on and goodbye to training wheels: Writing is not like riding a bicycle, and it can be quickly forgotten by those unskilled. Ekko Finschow, 18 years old, a student from Düsseldorf Recently, I saw an advertisement on YouTube that claimed: “Those who reject us will fall behind. We build the future.” It was promoting a KI platform for business marketing, which predicted the future through its use of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, I try to avoid using KI, yet I feel this fear of falling behind. Every day, I see how my classmates generate a project assignment, something I spent hours working on, in seconds. It seems to bother no one that we can't distinguish between a generated text and a human-written piece. And I wonder whether I’ll still have a place in the job market if I refuse to engage with KI. Close to my school transfer around 2024, when the KI chatbot ChatGPT became more well-known, I initially ignored it completely. I refused any contact. I told myself that it couldn’t be true that people would prefer a text from an algorithm rather than a person. Over the past two years, I managed to avoid engaging with KI effectively: I’ve never entered a prompt into ChatGPT, I use “minus-AI” in my Google searches, and I’ve done my best to criticize my classmates when they showed me a KI-generated video of our teacher. Every day, I make the decision to say no to KI because I am aware of the environmental damage caused by its use and don’t want my data sold to third-party companies. Recently, however, the use of KI has been pushed upon me forcefully. Would you prefer a KI DJ on Spotify or a KI-generated logo? It came to a point where my teachers assigned me a KI as work material. I realized I could no longer ignore the topic. Journalism lives off experience My classmates, on the other hand, have no guilt about presenting a KI-generated text to my German teacher. Content creators also show no hesitation in letting their entire script be generated by “Chatty.” And some journalists themselves see no problem in allowing Meta AI to handle their research. Yet journalism thrives on real experiences, on people who report from their own perspective. KI doesn’t produce new perspectives, instead throwing together thousands of existing ones into a pile and selling it as a supposedly neutral viewpoint. It also lacks the ability to question itself or its own thinking. Since KI isn’t a being, it inherits human biases just as humans do. Despite all the criticism, KI still stands as an example of humanity’s progress. A progress we can’t refuse, even if we wanted to. But we stand before an ethical abyss. If KI didn’t cause droughts or burn brain cells or sever our connection to reality, it might be our ticket to a bright future. Various models can help by simplifying data analysis, shortening the search through archives, and taking over monotonous tasks. But how can we, especially as journalists, preserve a human future, ensure responsible use of KI, while not getting lost in competition? In the future, KI could take care of tedious bureaucracy, and thus, as the ad on YouTube suggests, become part of the future. Because it saves time.