Kristen Hare has been writing about, teaching and studying local news for more than a decade.
She worries that the advent of artificial intelligence feels especially daunting to local journalists.
“I think a lot about them — the way they’re often overworked and constantly flooded with information about what they’re covering and what’s happening in our world,” said Hare. “If it’s hard for someone like me, who has a critical eye on the media industry, to keep up, I’m guessing it’s also hard for people who don’t have that same luxury.”
That’s why she convened a panel of experts and overhauled her popular Level Up course this year to focus on teaching AI to journalists.
Ahead of the course, which starts Oct. 1, we posed three questions to those experts:
- What’s one thing that people need to know right now about AI?
- What’s one practical way you’re using AI in your daily work?
- What’s one thing that scares you about the AI landscape?
Here’s what they said.
What’s one thing that people need to know right now about AI?
“AI is not going away, so it’s important to learn how to use it to your advantage and eliminate use cases where it’s a disadvantage.” — Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager AI strategy, product, Associated Press
“AI innovation isn’t just for tech giants — generative AI is making it accessible to all. By focusing on upskilling, even a small newsroom or individual journalist can harness AI’s potential.” — Nikita Roy, a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists focusing on AI literacy in the news industry
“It can turn any reporter into a data journalist, which is awesome. Generative AI programs can sort, classify and summarize thousands of pages of documents, show you how to visualize that data and turn it into an interactive chart.” — Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise
“I talk to a lot of journalists who see generative AI as a tool they can opt into or out of, like a buzzy new social network or passing newsroom fad. But that attitude fails to recognize how AI has already fundamentally changed their readers’ experience of the internet and the wider information ecosystem. Those readers, often without knowing it, likely encounter some form of AI-generated content every day. As journalists, we don’t really have the luxury of opting out of the implications there — to authorship, to reliability or to media trust and literacy.” — Caitlin Dewey, freelance journalist
“The deceivers are moving much faster than the correctors. This goes for the people who are using the technology as well as technologies themselves. There are a lot of tools that promise an easy way out of detecting manipulated media or generative AI. But what people need to know is that shoe leather reporting works best.” — Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief, PolitiFact
“It seems like many people think AI might soon replace a lot of jobs, including those in journalism. But I don’t think it’ll make a huge impact for journalists, because human interaction is key to good reporting, and AI lacks that piece. But newsrooms need to be transparent about how they’re using AI and its impact in their reporting.” — Fernanda Camarena, Poynter faculty
“There is so much bias built into the systems and we’re probably already past the point where we can fix them easily. The deployment of consumer-facing technology was so rapid there’s little thought about the ethics of how the technology will be used.” — Tony Elkins, Poynter faculty
What’s one practical way you’re using AI in your daily work?
“Translations. If you need to look up what laws are in the Netherlands, which is something we’ve had to do before, a good AI detector tool can give you a good idea of what something says. And there are so many now, you can cross reference them to ensure accuracy.” — Sanders, PolitiFact
“I use an AI chatbot to organize and summarize meeting notes.” — Rinehart, AP
“This is a very small thing, but also, as a writer, an invaluable one: Generative AI has totally freed me from tip-of-the-tongue syndrome. I regularly turn to ChatGPT and Claude with questions like ‘What’s the adjective of schadenfreude’ or ‘What’s a more polite word for passé?’ (There isn’t one in English and ‘dated,’ respectively.)” — Dewey, freelance
“I use AI tools like Perplexity to quickly gather information from multiple sources and Google Gemini to chat with YouTube videos, allowing me to extract insights without needing to watch the entire video — significantly streamlining my research and saving time.” — Roy, International Center for Journalists
“It’s hit or miss, but I use ChatGPT for coding. I analyze and write about X’s Community Notes data for my work in misinformation and media literacy, and I’ve used AI to suggest better ways to automate pulling the reams of data from X, visualize what I’m looking at and clean up R scripts that I’ve thrown together over the years.” — Mahadevan, MediaWise
What’s one thing that scares you about the AI landscape?
“I’m deeply concerned about the threat that generative AI poses to the business model of digital journalism. Applications like Perplexity, Google’s AI search overviews and Meta’s AI news summaries could really dent traffic to news publishers. I hope they can convince enough readers, in turn, that human-made news is worth paying for.” — Dewey, freelance
“Deepfakes and disinformation. Generative AI is also making it easier for anyone to create pink slime news sites and synthetic images and video.” — Mahadevan, MediaWise
“Trying to imagine AI’s potential impact on the news industry and preparing to adjust to those changes and challenges.” — Rinehart, AP
“How poorly understood the technology is broadly across the country. There are a lot of journalists who are superusers or who are super familiar with the ins and outs of this technology and the latest products. But I have found that unless you’re a superuser, it’s very hard to keep up. And so I worry that some journalists will dismiss AI out of hand, and that will prevent everyday Americans from becoming more familiar with it and that will just promote more fear. I think it’s incumbent on journalists to be familiar enough with the technology that we are decoding how it works … We know that people don’t trust it and also that they don’t understand it, so it’s on us to use specific terms about what it is and what it’s doing.” — Sanders, PolitiFact
“That once again, media companies are signing contracts that devalue our content in favor of short-term revenue gains. I really hope this isn’t the same story as Web 2.0 or mobile, but it’s hard to turn down the money.” — Elkins, Poynter
“If we don’t address how to work with AI in our newsrooms, we’re not innovating. It’s OK to experiment with it — newsrooms should at the very least not be scared to talk about it internally. But we need newsroom policies and standards for how to use it, just as we have standards for actual journalists and their work.” — Camarena, Poynter
“What scares me most is the growing potential for AI to be misused for disinformation at scale, undermining public trust in media and deepening societal divides.” — Roy, International Center for Journalists
Enrollment for Level Up: AI for Journalists is open now. Spots are limited; the virtual course starts Oct. 1.
