Journalists and Big Fact Check struggle to remain relevant in the age of AI

AI lacks the capability to fully replace journalism despite advances in large language models, as demonstrated by recent analysis showing critical gaps in context understanding and fact verification. This limitation becomes particularly concerning as traditional newsrooms continue to shrink and AI tools increasingly handle content that once required human expertise and investigation.

The big picture: Traditional journalism has faced a perfect storm of declining readership, shrinking newsrooms, and reduced editorial courage, leaving fewer human journalists to perform essential watchdog functions.

• Newsrooms have experienced massive staff cuts over the past decade, while journalists have become “less able to speak truth to power through a number of trends, some involving liability.”
• As media critic Jack Shafer notes: “Yesterday’s journalists thought the world revolved around what their newspaper wrote. Today’s journalists resign themselves to the fact that their copy simply doesn’t matter as much.”

Why AI struggles with journalism: ChatGPT and similar models demonstrate fundamental limitations when handling complex investigative stories and contextual analysis.

• When asked “Why did newspapers die?”, ChatGPT took unusually long to respond, eventually providing a comprehensive but surface-level analysis citing digital media, advertising shifts, and mobile technology.
• The model fails to understand nuanced contexts, as shown when it incorrectly interpreted an archived story about hydroelectric power generation, missing the actual environmental and regulatory implications.

Real-world consequences: Journalists report specific instances where AI tools provide dangerously inaccurate information that requires human verification.

• A reporter using AI services to identify Massachusetts’ largest factory received false information claiming Dell employed 10,000 people at a state facility—information that human journalists had to debunk.
• Unlike the investigative reporting of decades past, where journalists could pursue complex stories about utility deregulation and environmental impact, today’s reduced newsroom capacity limits such comprehensive coverage.

What’s at stake: The replacement of “manual, deliberate and painstaking journalism with collective digital searches that don’t always return the right result” represents more than just technological change.

• Newspapers served multiple key roles in society beyond just delivering information, making their decline different from other industries disrupted by technology.
• The loss of investigative capacity means fewer journalists available to “ring the bell” or “respond to the bat-signal” when important stories need coverage.

The broader context: This represents part of AI’s transformative impact across society, where significant capabilities are gained while essential human functions are lost.

• Unlike previous technological shifts like cloud computing or big data, AI’s influence extends into fundamental aspects of information verification and democratic accountability.
• The challenge involves navigating these changes while preserving journalism’s essential societal functions.