Chat GPT, an essay-producing AI site is not only helping students cheat, but also risking the credibility of journalists.

The journalism world hasn’t quite figured out how they will utilize AI in a positive way. Many news stories incorporate human emotion, which is something that AI hasn’t quite figured out. Therefore, many journalists don‘t see Chat GPT as an effective alternative to … .

Another issue with using AI in journalism is that it is not always accurate and often creates misinformation. When an article or report is not accurate, the news outlets’ credibility is questioned. When journalists lose their credibility, they lose readers. This loss can make a huge dent in the reputation of a newspaper.

For Chief editor of The Record North Shore, Joe Coughlin, credibility is a prime concern.

“But if I write an article, and it’s 95%, right, that 5% the readers are going to say, I can’t trust this guy. He’s wrong. But I’m only 5% wrong. Doesn’t matter, they’re gonna read you less,” said Coughlin

Although the loss of credibility can start off small, it is difficult to come back from. Journalists and media sources spend years trying to regain their credibility once it is called into question.

“That [regaining credibility] takes years of rebuilding and more resources and more money,” said Coughlin.

Much like ChatGPT, there is a new AI essay generator called GPT- 4. This system writes texts with greater human emotion. This can be threatening to journalists because one of the things journalists include in their writing and reporting is real human emotion. Accuracy, however, remains an issue here too.

During the 2016 election, ‘fake news’ became a problem for every prominent news source. Many prominent news sources had their credibility questioned. As AI becomes a major tool for receiving information, journalists are vigilant about the information collected from these sites.

Fake newspapers have been distributed among the Chicagoland area during the midterm elections in 2022 to push political ads against democratic candidates. According to an article written by Justin Kaufmann from Axios Chicago, these newspapers had readers thinking the news was “a vetted, objective news source — feature stories the governor says are racist.”

These newspapers seemed like credible sources with other non- political stories which were found to be AI generated. Other than the political ads, everything was written by generators with large amounts of inaccurate information.

Although minimal, there are positives to the use of AI in journalism. AI companies are selling information to newspapers such as the weekly weather and other information AI can produce very quickly and accurately.

“There’s a lot of companies that use AI to pull up details in certain verticals like sports, like here’s some sports scores, like do you want to put this newspaper?” said Coughlin.

The ability of AI is still uncharted which makes it an irresponsible alternative to hard working journalists. While in some cases AI is useful, and can be quite efficient, that does not take away from the fact that it is still a developing tool not ready for the media.