AI Is Why We Need Journalism

I’m a big proponent of artificial intelligence. I use it regularly, I talk about it often, and I believe it has enormous potential to make our lives better.

But I have to admit something about AI that increasingly bothers me: I don’t know what’s real anymore.

Audio can be faked. Photographs can be faked. Video can be faked. Writing can be faked. And all of it is getting so good that detecting the difference between authentic and AI-generated content is becoming increasingly difficult.

That creates a problem much bigger than someone passing off an AI-generated photo as genuine. What happens when we can no longer trust the evidence in front of our own eyes and ears?

I think this makes journalism more important than ever.

Journalism has somehow become one of democracy’s favorite punching bags, often treated as an enemy rather than one of the institutions necessary to sustain an informed society. In an era when virtually anyone can manufacture convincing “evidence,” we desperately need professional journalists who investigate, verify, corroborate, and put their reputations behind what they report.

But there’s a catch.

For journalism to truly reclaim that role, I think it must eventually divorce itself from corporate ownership and the relentless demand for profit. Journalists need the freedom to report what needs to be reported without worrying about advertisers, shareholders, ratings, clicks, subscriptions, or whether the truth is financially convenient for the company signing their checks.

Obviously, that raises a rather significant question: How do we pay for journalism if profit isn’t driving it?

I don’t know.

Maybe independent nonprofit models are the answer. Maybe publicly supported institutions are. Maybe we need something entirely new.

Or, ironically enough, maybe we should ask AI to help us figure it out.

Because as AI makes it harder to know what’s real, we’re going to need someone we trust to help us decipher the truth.