By Marian Amaria Bangura and Jordan Coburn
From workflow to news beats, artificial intelligence has opened journalists up to new possibilities — and challenges.
AI is impacting how journalists work in unprecedented ways. It’s changing how media professionals gather information, create stories and reach audiences. But as the technology evolves, journalists are asking how to use it responsibly, uncovering biases within the technology and considering where in their work they should use it, if at all.
TO AI OR NOT TO AI
Jenice Armstrong, a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, uses AI sparingly for research.
“If I do hit on AI, I always go to the source where the information came from because I don’t always trust information that AI gives,” Armstrong said.
Some journalists are a bit more open to implementing AI into their work process. Keenan Penn II, for example, used it as a “script editor” tool as a reporter at KWCH in Wichita, Kansas, a system his newsroom implemented. He used a Large Language Model (LLM) to identify areas within his stories that needed strengthening, such as adding more from a source or tightening his writing.
“It would suggest. It wouldn’t rewrite it for me,” Penn said.
Oyin Adedoyin, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal raises questions about how AI will impact the future, especially for young journalists.
“I’m curious how journalism schools, for instance, are going to teach students about how to incorporate it,” Adedoyin said. “Who benefits and doesn’t benefit from AI usage is a big question.”
REPORTING ON A NEW BEAT
For some journalists, the ethical question goes beyond whether they should implement it for their stories. AI is the story as major companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok are creating new environmental justice obstacles while shifting the trajectory of many major industries. A new beat has emerged, with outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Variety incorporating dedicated AI reporters to their newsrooms. And that lane continues to grow.
Stephanie Sugars, managing reporter at U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, said their questions should begin with the human biases built into the systems. She warns that many LLMs can carry the prejudice embedded in the information used to build them.
“Anything created by people that is based in language will carry the biases implicit to the content that it’s created from,” she said. “So the blind spot that people have, the biases, the racism, the discrimination can be very much built into whatever the language model is fueling from,” she added.
Sugars said journalists should also be looking into how AI is being used by public offices, including police departments, hospitals and other institutions, and what those decisions mean for the people on the receiving end. She implored journalists to ask questions on the “impact of AI chatbot on the forming or maintaining of social order.”
Data center plans, AI-powered hiring systems and the decision-makers behind LLMs should all be interrogated, Sugars noted. The story, Sugars said, becomes more meaningful when journalists move from explaining AI as a technology to examining how it is changing people’s lives.
Retha Hill, founder and CEO of AncestoriesXR, urged journalists to look beyond the extremes of AI as either a threat or a technological solution.
“AI is very transformative,” Hill said. “It’s going to be the most transformative technology in our lifetimes.”
But with that transformation comes an opportunity to examine both sides of the transition rather than treating AI as inherently good or bad. Hill said reporters should be looking at how it is being introduced in specific industries and communities, including health care and medical research, where its use may not always be obvious to the public.
Reliable reporting on AI is essential as it becomes harder for audiences to determine what is real. And it is even more essential for journalists not to break that trust — something happening more frequently as outlets begin relying on AI tools for writing and creation.
Sugars recalled seeing an article in which a line that appeared to have come directly from an AI chatbot was left in the published story. Mistakes like that, she said, can further erode an already fragile relationship between journalists and their audiences.
NAVIGATING A NEW HORIZON
Technology may be changing rapidly. But the questions journalists ask about AI are similar to ones they use to question any system, including who’s being impacted and why.
For Sugars, that means an AI accountability story does not have to begin with an explanation of how a large language model works. Sugars said that the same skepticism journalists apply to government agencies, corporations and other powerful institutions should extend to the technology shaping information itself.
It can begin with a person whose job was evaluated by an algorithm, a patient affected by an AI system, a community living near a data center or a journalist targeted through an AI-generated harassment campaign.
She added that the most important principle for covering AI is even simpler: Remember who the technology affects.
“Never forget the why,” she said. “And the why is the people.”
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