Journalists use AI daily, but face a real risk of losing their skills
Fifty-three percent of journalists worry about AI's impact on ethics and journalism. Yet 81% use it every day. The contradiction reflects a profession caught between efficiency gains and the danger of outsourcing critical thinking.
The tools journalists rely on vary widely. Google's NotebookLM pulls cited information from source material rather than generating text from scratch, reducing hallucinations. Claude Projects locks down specific instructions and focuses analysis on uploaded data. Auto-transcription services like Trint and Otter handle interviews in minutes instead of hours.
But the real risk isn't technical. It's cognitive.
The skill erosion problem
Pete Warren, an investigative technology journalist who has worked for the Guardian and Sunday Times, uses multiple AI tools for research. He does not use them for writing.
"If you don't keep writing yourself, you lose the skills," Warren said. "It's very easy to let the AI take over."
The pattern mirrors other technologies. When people rely on spell-check, their spelling deteriorates. When drivers use GPS constantly, they stop learning landmarks and routes. Army personnel refused to override missile systems because delegating responsibility felt safer.
Warren interviewed Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Edvard Moser about this phenomenon. Moser said humans navigate through reinforcement-remembering waypoints and landmarks. AI systems bypass that reinforcement entirely. During COVID, people who stopped navigating lost their mental route maps.
"AI is like Sat Nav," Warren said. "It has all of the data."
Tools that work-and their limits
NotebookLM converts one data type into another. Journalists can upload material, interrogate it for gaps, and generate data tables and infographics. It transcribes videos and interviews. The tool is available through paid Google Account plans.
Claude Projects lets journalists upload their own style guides and previous work, though results vary. Simon Bainbridge, former editorial director of the British Journal of Photography, found that custom GPTs wanted to "improve" transcripts no matter how specific his instructions were.
"It wants to impose a phraseology that sounds clever but often doesn't actually say anything," Bainbridge said. He described the style as "compressed academic language" that erodes readability.
Perplexity and Google Deep Research help with nuanced searches that outperform standard Google results. Both tools also find royalty-free images. Perplexity faces multiple lawsuits from publishers claiming it uses their content without consent.
Claude Cowork uses "agentic" AI-systems that complete tasks independently rather than answering questions in a chat window. It organizes files, reads emails, and suggests next steps based on what it finds. Tech journalist Kane Fulton described it as "having a researcher sit next to you."
The transcription trade-off
Many journalists rely on Otter for auto-transcription. The service has a significant drawback: it uses transcriptions to train its AI model and retains recordings indefinitely. Some newsrooms ban it for this reason.
Trint and other transcription services offer better security practices.
The writing question
Harriet Meyer, founder of AI for Media, which trains journalists and public relations professionals, said grounded AI models work best for journalism. These systems cite their sources rather than generating text from patterns alone.
The larger language models-ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini-come with warnings about hallucinations and bias. But focused versions of these tools can lock down specific instructions and analyze vast amounts of information quickly. Human journalists cannot spot patterns across that volume of data in the same timeframe.
That speed comes with a cost. Every hour spent not writing is an hour not reinforcing the core skill journalism demands.
Warren's advice is direct: use AI for research and transcription. Do not use it for writing. The moment you stop writing, you start losing the ability to do it well.
Your membership also unlocks:
