Journalism and the founding of A.I.

A recent article by the always excellent Ground Truth Project asked a key question about journalism's ability to answer the challenge of A.I. amid the distressing truth that on average two newspapers a year have closed every week in the last 20 years. A decline that I've highlighted on The Fourth Estate, my challenge to the marketing and advertising industry to make changes in programmatic buys to support news instead of exclude it.

But beyond the challenges that journalism faces, in the article, there is a kernel of an idea that's worth building on. Namely if one the key areas that we are having A.I. focus on - the development of LLMs (Large Language Models) through partnerships with major news outlets such as The Associated Press, does this not mean that in a way those original writers of news were themselves a precursor to the A.I. that now seeks to replace it, however unintentionally or unconsciously? After all, the singularity has not happened yet.

Journalism, in its founding, and protected still as the only media channel in the First Amendment, sought to distribute the news of the day to the populations of America - to be a single source of truth, backed up by a newsroom that fact checked where it could. Today, A.I. is headed much in the same direction. Now, news as we all know has bias and there are few newsrooms that do not carry some leaning to the left or the right, and those leanings are what generates editorial. Perspective must have an anchor, whether that's political or moral, and merely summarizing the collective consciousness of written thought - which is where A.I. currently sits - has some value, but only in being the average of everything.

And as journalists fear the reaper that they see as A.I., they must hold true to their unique perspective, something that amalgamating everything can never do, certainly not yet. The declines in journalism and newspapers began as they lost revenue and relevance in equal part. Who needs the weather forecast that's six hours old, when your phone can produce a radar doppler of the rain in real time? Or updates on voting breaking news events, that were written the night before. The internet has conquered that - and as form factors have changed from daily printed editions to digital subscriptions, so too have the smart organizations expanded from newsprint to news eco-systems. Take The Boston Globe and the launch of BG Today, a daily broadcast of TV news - a wildly ambitious project that involved building a fully functioning TV studio in the heart of their newsroom. Evolution can still happen and we should encourage and celebrate it.

Hope therefore springs eternal, if you have the drive and belief to see what's next instead of chasing what went before. Never has this been more true for professional news journalism. A.I. will write faster and cover the summary of events quicker than any human. So let it. Give it the average, the vanilla, the number 50 in the billboard chart. And let journalists focus on perspective, on uncovering the unique, the strange and the compelling stories that surround us. And much like the S curve of technology, let A.I. be the last part, the boring. And let journalism always play at the start. The exciting.