By Danielle Bonior and Lealina Reyes
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth.
Journalists in every corner of the world know the magnitude of this preface. It is a pledge, a prayer that each of us must religiously follow.
To write in the name of truth requires integrity with how we write the truth. It takes years of training, hard work, and a seemingly bottomless well of passion. But in the digital age when everything is at fingertips’ reach, a lifetime of dedication could be erased in mere seconds. With artificial intelligence (AI) seeping into every aspect of our lives, how can journalists uphold the oath to truth when the hands that write what we produce are not human?
Minutes, days, weeks, years; we’ve written. From me, to you, I have written for 210 days or 302,400 minutes or 7 months since the start of the academic year. In the 21 issues published in those months, perhaps you’ve wondered what the writing process is like for me—for us, as campus journalists.
As writers, we grudge through lines of prose, magnifying down to the most minute detail. We weigh the worth of one synonym over the other, needling our thoughts into tangible form and sculpting scattered ideas into wisps of something understandable. Not only for me, but also for others. Then, perhaps, it’s worth publishing.
That’s journalism. It’s writing about human experiences as a way to inform, as a call to attention, or as a call to action, in order to influence and (hopefully) change the way we experience life. It pursues hard-hitting topics like gender politics, economy, or education (take your pick). We write about events that opt for congratulations but most of the time, we write about events that are difficult to navigate. And writing about these things is scary and demanding.
So, what’s one to do about a problem like that? How do you improve from a situation that takes too much time, that’s prone to mistakes in logic or grammar or other follies of the human hand?
AI. She’s the new girl in town, and they say she’s got all of it figured out. No author’s block, no request for extended deadlines, no more middleman process between idea and output. Just a little bit of prompting, a couple seconds, and the article is done. It is finished.
It sounds human. You wouldn’t be able to tell. You would never know.
But is it right?
In the recently concluded college campus journalism writing workshop we’ve attended, we came in being somewhat prepared. We’ve practiced (on a weekly basis) and were there to show off our writing chops to see if our skills hold up.
Come time for feature writing, about 15 minutes of lecture, and our competition instruction told us to use AI. The instruction was to generate a feature article using an AI of our choice on Duterte’s recent trip to the Hague, and humanize it.
We did what was asked. We won 5th place (formally, officially, an honorable mention), and were asked to come up on stage. We accepted the award, we smiled for the pictures, but over shared looks, as writers, a similar sentiment: this win felt hollow.
If we were to ask the question, “is this right?” to the organizers, to the journalism veterans in attendance, the answer would be yes.
So, the next question would be, is this right for us?
Silliman University is quite liberal when it comes to student’s AI use. SU’s 2023 AI Integration Framework states that despite the use of AI, academic integrity can still be upheld through transparency (AI Declaration), direct communication, and ethical use (checking for percentage of AI use). For me, this is acceptable. However, academic writing is much different than journalism.
The whole beauty of journalism is in genuine human experience. Even if AI is humanized, it can never be human. It cannot feel the despair over injustice, or the obsession in poetry.
It’s difficult to write sometimes, yes, but must we seek to erase discomfort? Doesn’t pain highlight and color human experience?
If we use AI, it would be perfect.
It would cater to everyone, offend little, and resound in the hearts of no one. In that case, it is worthless. To describe it as the death of writing would be a disservice to the life which precedes the loss of death. To which AI-generated writing never had life in the first-place—just a skilled mimicry of collective media complacency.
To write in the name of truth requires integrity with how we write the truth. Using AI in journalism stains this integrity and tarnishes the truth we must tell. Not to mention, it also erases the time we dedicate to mastering this art.
15 seconds (or less) of AI generation versus 3,652 days, 120 months, and a lifetime in minutes—how long, they say, it takes to be a good writer. Seconds to the toil of years, those are the facts, and we’re compelled to reconsider: has time forced our hand to concede or is it simply a beckon for us, as writers, to measure up?
