Happy Monday!

I finally got the reader survey up and running so please take a few minutes to take it! I’d love to know what it is you want to see in Yap Year and how I can make this a better newsletter for you.

Today, I’m weighing in on the discourse around AI in journalism. It’s a little inside-baseball, but I’ve been curious about how AI has encroached into various industries — including my own. It also impacts news consumers since journalism is such a trust-based field and trust in AI is still pretty low. Some thoughts on this and more fun stuff below.  

Boy, was there AI discourse in the media industry this week. Wired published a piece highlighting the tech journalists, most of whom are independent, using AI to assist their work. The Atlantic covered how AI tools are being used by people at the New York Times. Then, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle sparked a huge debate on X after she shared her AI workflow. All of these anecdotes have begged the question: Is it ever appropriate to use AI in journalism? 

There are pretty strict standards around plagiarism and accuracy in journalism. When you throw generative AI into the mix, it further complicates what is ethical. If you train AI on your work and ask it to create more articles for you, is that self-plagiarism? Would the answer change if you, the writer, highly customized the AI drafting process to abide by your editorial standards and voice then human-edited the AI output before publication? 

Other uses for AI, as described by these journalists, are researching, fact-checking, SEO optimization, business planning, and editing. When you write for yourself, as the Wired interviewees do and I do here, you set your own rules. Still, I am curious about whether readers trust AI-assisted journalism or not. 

I think it makes sense for tech journalists to use AI since they often have to cover it. Presumably, their audiences are full of technologists who have no qualms with them using AI in their work. But it’s not something that is necessary for every beat reporter, especially those of us working in the culture space. Clearly, the industry needs to seriously evaluate how and why AI could be used in the craft. 

It’s no secret that I’ve been quite the AI skeptic here on Yap Year. I haven’t really used it much to “optimize” my process, as it were. I have been using Otter, an AI transcription service, since college. But I do not trust AI to write, ideate, or research for me. My biggest concerns would be that AI services are collecting my data, training their LLMs on my writing, and spitting out inaccurate or unusable information (although I recognize that this last point is more of an issue for free AI models). 

Much of my resistance also stems from the fact that I don’t feel the need to make my work more efficient. I am a firm believer that the most rewarding and interesting parts of writing and reporting are in the tricky act of articulating ideas. It’s admittedly a romantic perspective on writing, very much a “struggling artist” mentality (not that I’m an artist, but I think many creatives share this way of thinking). I think that the friction required to create something is the key to creating taste, style, and voice. 

Yet, I understand that I cannot stop progress. My work, after all, is always sitting at the intersection of technology. There is a nagging thought at the back of my mind that I should be exploring these tools more, just to build a better understanding of what people are doing and working with. (Although, tangentially, another fear I have is that I’m destroying the environment by simply playing around with the tech.)

There is also the fact that many journalists do use AI tools, whether they’re aware of it or not. The hard line for a lot of the people I know is in the menial tasks like transcription, spell checking, or SEO optimization. But when does the use of AI become not okay? It seems like research is the biggest gray area. A lot of people dislike the idea of using chatbots for research, but many of us use Google for this work, which is increasingly being taken over by Gemini results. Is the use of AI inevitable in some ways?

I’ve been mulling over a recent quote from The Argument’s Kelsey Piper on Friday’s edition of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. The episode discusses the possibility of an AI apocalypse, which is the scenario in which AI advances so far that it creates a superintelligence that wipes out humanity, or at least the need for it. AI models are getting better at such a rapid rate that companies have to create guardrails so that they don’t go rogue. This is a reality I’ve kind of been ignoring, an instinct that Piper made a good point about.

“The people who are working the most closely on these [models] are saying we're not prepared for what's coming,” she said. “And a lot of other people are still just kind of hoping that this all goes away, which is a very understandable thing to want. But you have to [understand]. I want a cure for cancer to come out tomorrow, I know that's not going to happen. I might want AI to go away, AI is not going to go away.”

So if AI isn’t going away and prominent journalists are using it in their workflow, what does the future of my industry look like? I maintain that it’s not useful for most of us to use in writing, reporting, or ideating — the biggest parts of the job. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the industry is not completely against the use of AI. It doesn’t look like we are really ready to grapple with this disruption.

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. Last week, the Music League I’m in voted on a covers category. It sent me down a rabbit hole of great covers. Here are some of them.

In this week’s playlist:

Other things I want to share with you.