Journalism Schools Face a Real Problem: Students Using AI to Skip Learning
A journalism professor recently caught several students submitting AI-generated work on final exams. The students who turned in the assignments had written with integrity - or so it appeared. But detection came down to one thing: the imperfections that revealed machine authorship.
The problem isn't that AI exists. It's what happens when students use it to replace thinking instead of enhance it.
The Skill Gap
Consider the cyclist who rides 50 miles on an e-bike when asked to build fitness on a regular bike. Or the lifter who lets a machine do the work. Neither develops the strength they claim to have.
Writing is no different. Hitting return and printing does not make someone a writer.
One of writing's core accomplishments is finding your voice. Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Trey Anastasio, Jimmy Page, John Mayer, Prince, and Carlos Santana could each play "Johnny Be Good" - and each version would sound distinctly different. AI writing lacks that. It's air guitar with a print button.
Consider the journalism classics: Joan Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men." These pieces exist because writers did the reporting, struggled with the prose, and solved problems themselves. None of them could have been produced by a program.
The Real Issue: Skipping Steps
If students let AI handle the writing, they never learn to spot when a program produces imperfections. They can't see the tell because they haven't developed enough skill to recognize it.
Real writers need to be better than the program. That requires practice that AI shortcuts eliminate.
AI also fails at nuance. A program might call a 72-53 basketball game a "blowout" based on the score alone. But the actual story - an injury, a coaching decision, an overachieving team playing heroically in defeat - gets lost. Accomplished reporters catch those details because they've done the work.
How Professors Are Pushing Back
Some journalism instructors now require students to include original reporting that can't exist online yet. They ask for drafts to see how reporting evolved. They hold in-class writing labs where AI use becomes obvious.
They also keep their office doors open.
Students who struggle with a lead, miss a source, or distort a quote with ellipses now walk in and ask for help. Those conversations often veer into internships, graduate school, beats to pursue, and personal concerns. Life-changing meetings happen because students had to solve their own problems first.
None of that occurs if a program solves the writing problem.
The Sequence Matters
People crawl before they walk, walk before they run, run before they soar. Each step influences what comes next.
Skip the walking - let something else crawl for you - and the results won't be fully formed or independent.
To train reporters to spot, process, and communicate news with clarity and insight, they must be able to do so themselves. Whether the internet is working or not.
AI is useful for research. For writing and editing, it's often just replacement dressed up as enhancement.
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