The idea that ai will “find corruption” for you is fucking appalling. Using ai to put things in chronological order and find the right synonym for you is a bizarre time saver that I doubt saves time or increases quality. On the chronology thing, every investigation should have a timeline, but the

point of that isn’t just getting dates in the right order; you go over the information bc it gets complex quickly and it helps you keep things straight while you’re reporting, reveals contradictions (I.e. lies!) and highlights what the biggest “moments” are as you’re doing interviews & writing

You can’t outsource that kind of analysis to ai. I’m also stunned that there seems to be a willingness to let the ai tell reporters what to pay attention to, what to cover, what’s important. I’m sorry, that’s so fucking dumb & explains why a lot of national reporting is regurgitating the same shit

Another example: why cover a city council meeting when you can get ai to tell you what happened and what matters? Aside from the fact that ai could very likely miss something important bc you asked it to look for something else, jfc, why do you even want to do journalism at that point?

If ai is covering your meeting, you’ll miss weird pauses, tones, faces that people make, context, & you’ll likely miss, idk, “corruption” that ai is supposed to spoon feed you bc you aren’t paying attention to people and what makes them, idk, interesting, human & not just some data point?

Getting ai to write records requests and appeals: I don’t understand 1) how this would save time or 2) how the fuck ai would intuit what you actually want to request. Also, to be blunt, records requests and appeals aren’t actually hard to do. This outsourcing of thinking is just disturbing to me but

part of the reason for that is all of this shit devalues my work as a journalist. There’s no need for me to help uncover corruption; a robot can do it. There’s no reason for me to put thought into how I write or try to make my writing, idk, beautiful or original. A robot can decide how to do that

The public & even fellow reports will eventually think it’s all the same & journalism doesn’t demand skill, the ability to examine complex info, etc. Like, do y’all still want us to get paid for this work? Bc almost everyone in that piece was pushing for our intellectual labor to become obsolete