ChatGPT won’t replace the role of journalism

In an article by Business Insider, there are ten jobs that ChatGPT may replace, and journalism is one of them. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is an AI neural network (ANNs) trained on large volumes of online text to generate natural, human-like responses. It can answer complex questions, write computer code, write college-level essays, explain scientific concepts on many levels, and even give medical advice. It always disclaimers that users must verify things themselves in the real world.

Source: ChatGPT website

If you ask anything on ChatGPT, it will give you the answer in just a few seconds. We don’t know if the information it provides is correct, but it can be denied that AI has reached a level of knowledge beyond the intelligence of humanity. The performance of this super AI left everyone in awe, to the point that ChatGPT can be a “Google killer.”

ChatGPT's influence extends far beyond the demise of Google: Human jobs are also at stake. Indeed, ask ChatGPT what topic a journalist wants to cover. It will finish an article in 10 seconds instead of spending hours writing one. That is a significant threat to the news industry. But it is not a story about replacing a journalist. It is about an untruthful information spreader and the limitation of the information.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me a story on the earthquake in Turkey, and it immediately wrote an article in a few seconds, which amazed me. However, as I was reading, I found many problems with the "article.”

First, it is just a regular essay that a student can write. It is outside the AP Style as a journalist must follow in their stories. Second, it only provides a few specific metrics, but the metric needs to be more accurate. Everything people already know is all the information it provides, and nothing is new. It is like a brief. Third, there are no reliable sources, witnesses, or updated situations in Turkey.

In short, it has information on the earthquake, but this is not news.

ChatGPT can support journalists in writing articles and handling simple interview questions for news. But things are more complex. The peculiarity of this AI is the ability to synthesize and interpret the information it collects to answer for a particular purpose, but the synthesis and response are only general. For information and specialized knowledge, which are rarely published to the outside, this technology cannot know to synthesize.

For example, the confidential information of someone or an agency, usually only known within that unit or by an individual, must be analyzed and synthesized. ChatGPT will not be able to do it. This analysis and synthesis require many factors.

Articles on investigative and factual intrusion information are often exclusive. Only journalists can find and exploit those unique stories. They must analyze, select, and dig deep to produce a complete article.

ChatGPT only helps reporters synthesize information more quickly, but if it is possible to replace reporters with writing articles, I confirm that is impossible.

For a press agency, when using this application to operate the whole newsroom and aim to serve the public in a better way. Specifically, here it will support the editorial office in creating content, writing the article titles, and the editorial's emails to respond to readers ...

Therefore, regardless of whether individuals or organizations are using this application, it must be considered in many different aspects. It is new, cheap, and easy to use and can be used freely. If I'm just interested in the "reverse" test, it's not bad. Still, many factors need to be considered when it comes to practical application—especially the story about content, images, rights, and security.

To optimize their work, journalists should use the superiority of ChatGPT to serve professional activities such as summarizing text content and large documents, creating questions with a topic that they are not familiar with or looking for a new perspective, asking ChatGPT to provide a quote from a specific character, ask ChatGPT to help you with different tests, or translate content from one language to another... But pay attention to carefully check the authenticity of ChatGPT's answers because the responses may be "made up" by themselves.