AI in the media doesn’t have to be bad news. There are other AI applications that could benefit the public. For example, it can improve accessibility by helping with tasks such as transcribing audio content, generating image descriptions, or facilitating text-to-speech delivery. These are genuinely exciting applications.

“We can think of ChatGPT as an automated mansplaining machine – often wrong, but always confident. Even with assurances of human oversight, we should be concerned when material generated this way is repackaged as journalism.”

That’s why AI companies must have a vested interest in the sustainability of diverse information sources like journalism. This is not only ethically sound, but also the best strategic bet in the long run. Without diverse, fresh, human-driven data, tech companies risk endangering the well-being of their models and leading to stagnant or even regressive AGI development.