"All we can do, really, is avoid letting AI become our only option to do anything work-related rather than just having it in our back pocket as something we can use when our brains fail us." (The Whit Staff)
Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic right now, not only on our college campus, but also in the world. Love it, hate it, or fear it, AI has infiltrated our lives, and everyone has an opinion on it. It is the opinion of the Whit staff that AI is not to be used to write articles, and AI should not be used to the extent that the work is no longer human.
However, the debate stands: how much AI is too much AI, and are we becoming too lenient as a society? Everyone has a line. But how much of this is really in our control? The Whit staff members have mixed feelings in regards to AI, especially when it comes to our futures as writers, which to some is considered a “threatened” career.
Beth Cimaglia, Editor-in-Chief: I’m a senior now, and in my time at Rowan University, the overall consensus on AI has changed. Newsrooms in the real world are becoming more accepting of AI, and this is trickling down into our classrooms. This is understandable; the world is changing, and we must adjust, but I believe this is a huge problem.
I hear my peers saying that they use ChatGPT to help them write ledes and headlines. This is fine, but my counter to this is that journalists in the field before us did not have ChatGPT, and they wrote headlines themselves. We can use our brains; we are perfectly capable of doing so. Does it make it easier? Sure it does. But the more we rely on these services to make our lives easier, the more things we are going to let slide. Soon, it will be “I’ll just let ChatGPT help me write this sentence so it makes sense.”
I believe in empowering others. I believe in empowering women, in empowering my peers, and in empowering journalists. We, as writers, should feel empowered to write our own ledes, headlines, and stories, not because it feels good to be confident in ourselves, but because we indeed have the ability. I, for one, refuse to let AI platforms take away my power, and I refuse to use it as a crutch. I think this is a dangerous road that we are headed down. As the old saying goes, “You give them an inch, they take a mile.”
In the Whit room, this is what I tell my writers and the editorial staff: You are empowered to write things yourself. We do not need robots writing things for us. Ask your professors for help, ask your editor for help, ask your peers for help, but I implore you, do not ask a robot for help.
Nothing will ever be able to beat human experience, told through human words. Written communication has been the human way of passing down history for generations. We have evolved greatly as a society since we used to dwell in caves and draw pictures on walls, but the medium of writing has remained the same. Journalists are said to be writing the first draft of history. Journalists are. Not robots. People experienced history, not robots. If robots want to weigh in on their own history in the future, then sure, have a Tesla robot write a history book. But nothing will ever replace a human being’s lived experience.
Katherine Thorn, Managing Editor: As a student journalist who is hopeful to throw myself into the journalism field after graduation, AI is a very daunting tool in my eyes. It is no secret that AI has taken the world by storm over the last few years, and many educators and employers have done their due diligence to limit AI in the workplace. As an aspiring journalist, I think it is crucial that we try to limit the use of AI in the field. Journalism is a way to share the stories of real people, and it isn’t doing those people justice if a robot is telling their story. These real people have authentic and touching stories, and they deserve actual humans putting their fullest effort into telling their story and not a robot.
Christopher Otto, News and Photography Editor: The amount of which we do or don’t accept AI into our lives is a very tricky bridge to cross. There are absolutely limits to how much AI we should be implementing. It’s one thing if we’re using tools powered by AI as a guide or an aid to keep our levels of creativity fully charged. However, we tend to become a little too reliant on it from time to time. It’s no secret that students on campus have used AI in the past for help on class assignments and essays. A lot of professors, especially at Rowan, have sworn to crack down on having anyone in their class use AI for any means. Anyone who actually paid attention to their class syllabus this year would’ve seen exactly how much more the Code of Conduct warned about using AI for anything class-related. There are some professors, however, who have become a little more relaxed regarding AI. Not completely soft on the topic, but somewhat more lenient depending on how open we are as students about our usage of AI.
What we can do about AI in terms of preventing it from overtaking our jobs and our livelihoods really revolves around how accepting we are of it, both individually and collectively. As a college composed of people from different walks of life with different sets of beliefs, everyone is going to treat AI differently. Some may choose to be blind to the longer-lasting effects of AI not just on people, but on the environment as well, all because it makes their lives easier. On the other hand, some may recognize both the benefits and detrimental effects AI brings to the table, and they make their decision from there, whether they remain indifferent on the matter or if they’re wholeheartedly against it. All we can do, really, is avoid letting AI become our only option to do anything work-related rather than just having it in our back pocket as something we can use when our brains fail us.
Marchella Mazzoni, Features Editor: As a college student who came into my freshman year at the beginning of AI’s take off, I’ve watched as professors have become more accepting of AI throughout my time in university. As a freshman, I remember professors having strict rules they enforced on students’ use of AI, and many did not allow its use in any form. Last year, I began to realize that each of my professors had different rules surrounding students’ use of AI in classrooms. Now, as a junior, I’ve seen professors become softer on students’ use of AI. I believe that professors should not allow students to use AI and should enforce strict penalties against those who use it. While I don’t think AI is taking our jobs, I do think it is making our society as a whole more dependent and lazy. I understand how AI can be a useful tool to help students with grammar, sentence structure, etc. However, using AI for more than this is when it leads to a larger problem.
Mattie Mac Kay, Arts & Entertainment Editor: I personally believe that AI has little positive effect in the newsroom. There’s truly no amount of robots that could replicate being in a newsroom with some of my best friends till the latest hours of the night and making a paper. I do genuinely believe we have gone so soft on AI. This is not something we should have an acceptance of, or become accustomed to, and accept in any creative capacity, or any capacity for that matter. As an entertainment journalist, I don’t feel absolutely threatened, but more so scared. No robot can write a piece about who looked the best at the VMAS, or a genuine review of the latest Ariana Grande release. When that does happen, that’s when we know we officially have lost the plot.
Lily Miller, Opinion Editor: I despise AI. The minute the AI overview overtook search results on Google was the minute I went from merely apathetic to something else entirely.
My hatred doesn’t just stem from an AI overview, though. As an artist, AI threatens the work I’ve dedicated my short life to, not just as a journalist but also as a playwright, composer, and poet. The only work of mine AI doesn’t threaten is live performance, which is ironic when I spent my entire life being told that the performing arts are a dead-end field. Look who’s laughing now that a robot can’t replace the art of live performance.
Still, I’m not blind to the benefits AI presents in the short term. Replacing grunt workers with AI in a variety of fields is easier and cheaper. Higher-ups, however, are much harder to replace with a language model. This begs the question, how will colleges continue to produce graduates who find work when entry-level positions are taken by AI and upper-level positions are filled by the last pillars of the old world? I don’t know the answer to that, and it scares me when higher education is adapting at a snail’s pace to technology that threatens to make it obsolete.
So, despite my hatred of AI, it seems that Rowan should adopt it, and adopt it fast. But fast doesn’t mean recklessly. It’s imperative that our administration works to create programs that research the ethics of AI and promote ethical usage of AI in our classrooms, if that exists at all. We need policies that dictate when and how AI can be used to optimize students’ work without compromising students’ critical thinking skills, and we need to track this use and determine when it breaks these policies.
That said, I will never use AI. I am a proud, AI-hating elitist. The other day I wrote a challenging email, and instead of hitting up ChatGPT to make it more corporate-core and less filled with rage and distaste, I asked other human beings for advice and then used my functioning brain to fix it up. It was an exercise in empathy and also patience, skills that seem to be in short supply these days.
Sarah Shockey, Sports Editor: In the context of sports, AI is already taking several jobs. ESPN uses it to write its game recaps, along with several other major platforms. This causes these companies not to have to hire writers to fill these needs, dwindling career opportunities even more.
I’ll be honest when I say I do use AI to help write headlines and occasionally outline. With that being said, I NEVER use it to write entire articles for me, and neither should anybody else. People are paid to be journalists with the expectation that they will write. Using AI to do that work defeats the whole mission of journalism and only does the journalist a disservice. People can’t improve on their writing if a non-sentient intelligence is doing it for them.
Caitlin Schad, Social Media Editor: Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is getting smarter on a daily basis and is changing the way we think and function as a society. Many Universities have a strict no AI policy, but the real question is, are professors enforcing these policies? Many schools have the technology where all assignments have the possibility of scanning for AI when an assignment is submitted. Students are advised against AI at the beginning of the semester; however, are professors actually searching for it? I believe that many have found a way to “beat the system”. There is a large difference in copying and pasting an essay from Chat GPT and using it to write the essay in your own words. Either one of these is wrong, but I feel as if technology and AI scanning programs aren’t able to pick up if someone is pulling sentences rather than using AI to write their entire essay. To answer the question, I believe that it’s not so much the professors who are getting too soft but rather the students who are becoming smarter and can camouflage AI within their own writing. I believe that AI can be good until a fault. There are many good ways to use ChatGPT besides cheating purposes. Recently, I traveled to Greece, and I had a hard time trying to find things to do at the places I visited, so I asked ChatGPT for a travel itinerary, and I found it very insightful. AI is a baseline of information, meaning that not every piece of information that is getting spewed out is correct, and so more research is almost always required. However, I believe that it can be a great tool used to assist different projects. When it comes to careers, I don’t believe AI is taking over. I think that humans provide an emotional appeal that AI can not yet provide. Human beings are able to physically be where AI cannot. Journalists, for example, often attend different events such as sporting events. AI can only take information that other people have given and make educated guesses on what the event was like because they were not there. I think that if people have passions and keep pursuing those passions, AI will not have a chance.
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