Could AI Replace Journalists, Authors?

After a former Anthropic engineer said AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade" last week, more Americans have begun to question the scope of the technology's creative and innovative power.

Differing Perspectives: "Artificial intelligence offers undeniable breakthroughs in cinema – extending visual imagination, filling landscapes, and replacing dangerous stunt work. But these are logistical triumphs, not artistic ones," wrote opinion writer Andrew Moore for Washington Examiner (Lean Right bias). "It can mirror the language of intimacy without participating in the condition that gives intimacy its depth. It is visually and textually astonishing, yet existentially vacant."

"I love AI… Go ahead and use AI however you like. Except art. If you use it for your art, you're a freakin' hack," contended Colson Whitehead in an opinion for The New York Times (Left). Bret Stephens (Lean Right) furthered this narrative, pleading, "Never let AI do your writing for you." He asserted that AI "undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society's collective ability to reason, a culture's inner capacity to create and everyone's reason to care," and emphasized how writing "enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate – and accountable." Otherwise, he warns, "Words become hollow."

Bryan A. Garner partially agreed with Stephens in an opinion for National Review (Right), stating, "AI can absolutely induce indolence. Anyone who stops drafting, revising, questioning, and editing will eventually lose those abilities." However, he opposed Stephens' plea against the apparatus entirely: "The problem isn't AI. It's intellectual surrender. There's a world of difference between using AI as an editorial assistant and using it as a substitute for judgment. Stephens largely ignores that important distinction. He treats every use of AI as though it were an abdication of authorship. It isn't. Used carelessly, AI can weaken the habits that good writing requires. Used with discipline, it can strengthen them."

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What The Data Says: The University of Montreal published research in January that compared over 100,000 people with artificial intelligence systems and found the following: "Generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests. … But there's a clear ceiling. The most creative humans – especially the top 10% – still leave AI well behind, particularly on richer creative work like poetry and storytelling."

Research out of multiple universities, last edited in June, examined over 370,000 college admissions essays and found that essays written after ChatGPT's release in 2022 "used a greater diversity of words, but they often contained fewer original ideas," according to a Georgetown University analysis. "The issue, the study warns, is that humans generally associate a greater diversity of words with greater creativity. That's because throughout the history of human thinking and writing, the creativity of words has been generally linked to the creativity of ideas because of the shared networks in the human brain," it stated, suggesting the belief in AI's creativity actually hinders that of humans. "When a group of outside experts who study creativity read the essays, they rated the essays that used ChatGPT as more creative, even if they didn't necessarily offer more creative ideas."

One researcher, Adam Green, furthered the concern, "As people have lost this spatial ability [due to the development of the GPS], it is very likely they're losing more general cognitive abilities," and suggested AI could mean the same for creative processes.

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