The humanity of language and the inevitability of technology to shape its future with Deborah Linton, Words Human at Group Of Humans

Tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be a writer…

I knew I wanted to be a journalist by the time I was 13. Growing up I wasn’t a big reader of books, but I loved long-form articles and would read newspaper supplements cover to cover. I spent all my free time and holidays interning and working on national newspapers and magazines, approaching editors blindly, getting myself bylines.

I trained the old school hard way – on a news patch: local, regional then national journalism. I worked as a news reporter and political correspondent, including dispatching from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earned my stripes that way. But long-form was always my passion; somewhere I had the space to translate the story of a person or company and to understand why their voice and story needs to be out there.

I’ve always loved the power words have to engage people and to elicit emotions, and I want to translate that to all the media I work in – feature writing, branded content, ghostwriting books… everything.?

Do you think AI and tools like ChatGPT will make it harder to become a journalist or writer?

What’s happening with AI right now doesn’t feel dissimilar to what was happening around 15 years ago in journalism, when we moved from print to digital first: new technology and huge panic. Jobs are going to go! Everything’s going to change! It will never be the same again! And it wasn’t ever the same again. But actually, new jobs and new ways of working were created. I don’t believe this fear is valuable.

Once again, we’re about to go through a huge transition. But if you’re looking to get into the industry and are savvy, you need to be on top of what the next jobs will be – utilising AI, working alongside it rather than opposing it.

Newsquest just appointed their first AI Powered Reporter to work specifically with AI to explore and generate ways to work with it. It's just like I remember being in a newsroom when they first appointed a data team. Why? To crunch data and create stories. It was pioneering at the time, but now every newsroom has one.?

And we’re in a similar place again. We’re in an industry that is threatened by AI but inevitably we’re going to work with it, even if we don’t know how it’s going to play out. And it’s going to happen at speed, of course.

Do you think that speed of adoption is scary and puts journalistic integrity – quality, accountability, humanity – at risk?

I think the smartest people in the industry, as with any other, are the ones using this window where we’re already moving past ‘early adoption’ into a stage of pioneering the tech. So where can we use humans and AI together? And actually, again, a smart young journalist going into the newsroom would be putting those ideas on the table and helping to identify that, just like we’re doing at Group of Humans and why I wanted to be part of that.

Yes, it can feel like a scary time for creatives. But there are at least two distinct sides to ‘writing’ both in journalism and outside it.?

You have the well trodden Buzzfeed type articles which, ironically, we were scared would take our jobs a decade ago but that have now been the first returned to technology. Stuff that’s easy to research online, doesn’t need the human skills of a good writer. These are already being eaten up by AI, and we’re seeing jobs being cut because of it.

Then there’s the stuff where AI is not ready or sophisticated enough on an emotional level to take over the human side. Currently AI is an aggregator, which is why it can create clickbait articles. But it doesn’t have the capability to analyse, synthesise, contextualise, engage, fact check and think critically. And it’s these skills that titles, companies and brands employ quality, well-versed writers for.?

At the same time we have to be acutely aware that it could be able to do these things, and soon. Perhaps the bigger problem is that journalism hasn't actually yet found its model to fully recover from moving to digital…

And what about AI’s impact on other writing roles – copywriting, marketing, branding, advertising…?

In the corporate space at the point where we are right now, I think that depends very much on how seriously a company takes its marketing and branding, and how keen it is to engage.?

Any company can of course ask AI to write the copy for its website, and depending on the company that might be fine. If the company needs to really engage with its consumer base, which is typically why they bring in copywriters, marketing agencies and the like, then AI can’t cut it. It lacks the ability, the nuance, the empathy to connect all those dots and to do it in a voice that stands out from the competitors, which is precisely what you need from these roles.

Then what role does AI have in written content creation, whatever its form?

At the moment, I view it as a research tool, not a writing tool. Right now, I struggle to see a scenario where a company could set a marketing brief, ask AI and a professional to write it, look at the results blindly and not choose the professional writer.

The same in journalism. I’m currently writing a 900 word feature on lung cancer and a 3,000 word one on relationships; AI isn’t capable of doing either. Sure, I could use it for research – “show me all the symptoms of lung cancer” – but I’m still going to cross check every single fact to make sure of its context, accuracy, that it comes from a respectable source and if I need to accredit someone. My relationships feature has to be original, nuanced and highly emotive to engage its readers. It also involves half a dozen verified experiences, carefully chosen to complement one another. These are a human writer’s skills.

Basically, none of us trusts AI yet and with good reason: because there’s no transparency. And that’s a really important part of our job as writers and journalists – that what we write and put in front of readers and clients doesn’t? place them in danger or land them or the title we’re writing for in some kind of litigation.

Do you see AI as plagiarism?

I don’t think that changes the situation either way, so it doesn't help to think about it. Some people say there is no original writing any more but I think there’s lots – it just tends to be the ideas are the things getting rehashed, stories recycled.

But that’s just how it is – the internet with its lack of regulation and accountability has already made sure of that, so I'll let it be someone else’s problem to worry about! Because of that though, the generation of journalists coming through now are very different to my generation, just as I was to the journalists that came before me.

Today, journalists aren’t expected to come up with the same kind of original ideas as pre digital so much as to mine the internet for what people are talking about and how to offer a take on that or to synthesise it. AI is just an extension of that.

As a journalist, my moral compass is so embedded and immovable that I don’t give it another thought – I simply would never plagiarise anyone because I would lose all my integrity. But once I write something and it goes online, anyone can plagiarise it already, and I’m sure they do, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it because that would be exhausting!