A former editor of The Independent has suggested news companies are more likely to use time savings created by AI to sack staff than to redeploy them to do more original journalism.
Speaking at a London Press Club debate on AI and journalism on Monday night, Chris Blackhurst voiced a fear that easily-produced “guff” was likely to fill the void left as artificial intelligence undermined the news industry’s business model.
Blackhurst was responding to a point from another panellist, consultant Rupert Knowles, who said AI “can certainly free up time to actually do other things” in a newsroom, for example by creating multiple versions of a social media post for different formats.
Several newsrooms have begun implementing AI for minor editorial tasks, including creating social copy, creating article summaries or brainstorming headline ideas. Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait said in December that it was “pretty clear” to him that such summaries “both help our readers and save time for editors”.
‘They might be freeing people up to work elsewhere, but they won’t be freeing them up to do quality journalism’
But Blackhurst said: “The idea that people are going to be ‘freed up’ to generate original content — I don’t really buy. I’m afraid on that point I remain very cynical.”
Blackhurst, who has also served in roles including city editor at both the Evening Standard and Sunday Express and deputy editor of Sunday Times investigative team Insight, said that in his experience proprietors needed significant persuading to see the value in expensive journalism like foreign correspondents and investigations. He added that he thought proprietors viewed AI as “a very convenient, very quick tool”.
“Maybe I’m bitter and disheartened, but I’m not sure that proprietors and business models will be freeing people up,” he said. “They might be freeing people up to work elsewhere, but they won’t be freeing them up to do quality journalism.”
Anne-Marie Tomchak, the digital editorial director at the Daily Mirror, was more optimistic, arguing “we as journalists need to become AI practitioners”.
For more than a year Mirror parent company Reach has been using an in-house generative AI tool named Guten to speed up the process of “ripping”, in which content from one Reach site is rewritten and published on another.
At the time the tool was introduced the company told staff that it would “free up time spent on repetitive tasks”. Fellow regional publishing giant Newsquest similarly employs “AI-assisted reporters” whose job is to use generative AI to rewrite press releases in order to free up time for other journalists on the team to do more reporting in their communities.
Tomchak said: “The big challenge is you’re trying to meet really ambitious targets with scale that you want to achieve while also producing quality. And we cannot give up on the idea that we can produce quality. We have to continue to strive to tell these stories, otherwise what’s the point?”
She said that earlier the same day she had signed off on one story from the ground in Ukraine, marking three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and another which was an undercover investigation into cosmetic surgery.
“The challenges are, it’s not just making the product now, it’s where you distribute that product and where the audience finds your storytelling. And that’s part of the issue that we have. It’s the system that our content is in — it’s no longer fully within our control.”
“I think AI is part of the problem and the solution,” Tomchak said, giving as an example the technology’s use both for creating and detecting deepfakes.
“If we collaborate with AI, we can continue to maintain trust and impart the information and find new ways of actually meeting the audience where they are, and use data in a way that cuts through that noise.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity that we’re not really acknowledging here in this room tonight.”
AI and search: ‘The idea that people really go and search deeply is, unfortunately, not true’
Emma Loffhagen, culture and lifestyle commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday, cautioned against thinking the main threat to journalism from AI was the technology “actually writing the article for us”.
“AI can’t go and interview a grieving mother,” she said. “AI can’t win over the trust of a whistleblower. AI can’t do the most fundamental things that we journalists do.
Loffhagen said the problem arose “when users sidestep those legacy media organisations and instead just go to ChatGPT”.
“Where it threatens the business model is if I was to go and ask ChatGPT: ‘Give me some information about an iPhone’, for example, then it aggregates all the information from journalists who have written these articles… and so those organisations are not getting that money.”
Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity sometimes provide links to allow users to continue their research beyond the answers provided on-platform, and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has previously claimed that when its search users are presented with AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries that answer queries without the user needing to click through to a site — they are more likely to click a highlighted link.
According to Press Gazette analysis, referral traffic sent to news publishers from ChatGPT remains negligible.
Loffhagen said: “We know from user behavior that users don’t search more deeply — Google’s page two search never gets used.
“The idea that people really go and search deeply is, unfortunately, not true.”
Loffhagen added that poor trust in the news industry, particularly among younger people, risked compounding this problem.
“In order for AI not to be an existential threat to journalism there needs to be public will” to act, she said.
“That combination of a young generation who are far more tech literate, far more likely to use ChatGPT and AI models, and also just have a lot less trust in new organisations as well, means that for a younger generation I don’t think that there is that cognisance of what an existential threat to human-led journalism would mean.”
Blackhurst suggested that as AI undermined the economics of original newsgathering, newsrooms would create lower-quality content.
He recalled free advertiser newspapers, asking: “How many articles in that advertiser, in all honesty, were worth reading? You didn’t read it — you flicked through the ads and then you threw it away, you put it in the cat litter tray, something like that.”
Such content, he said, is “what is going to replace journalism”.
“The truth is there are people producing that sort of stuff, that sort of guff… and they believe that’s journalism. It is not journalism, and we shouldn’t allow it to be so.”
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