Happy week four, Pioneers! We have officially made it one month through the semester. Only three more to go!

This week’s column is going to be a little different. As we all know, artificial intelligence (AI) has been everywhere over the last few years. From ChatGPT to OpenAI and so much more. The fear that technology is taking over our lives and our jobs is slowly becoming more real, especially for the journalism industry.

As addressed in our news briefs this week, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an AI-generated graphic in one of their print editions last week. While a small graphic about wishing others to stay warm during the recent frigid weather may not seem like a big deal, it really is, and not just because workers, also known as the Pittsburgh Union Progress, have been on strike for almost 16 months.

Using an AI-generated graphic is completely going against the ethical foundations that journalists have been establishing their careers upon for so long: creating original content and reporting on the truth.

You may be saying that we should embrace AI sooner rather than later before it is too late, but we cannot accept this. AI directly impacts real people with jobs. Workers are people too, and deserve to be treated as such.

Over these last 16 months of the strike, this is the lesson that we should be taking away. Saving a few bucks here and there is not sustainable or acceptable. AI cannot and will not replace good, quality journalism. There is already enough fear that the news is fake and embracing AI will only further exacerbate the situation, leading to horrible situations like the January 6 Insurrection.

The rate of local newspaper closures accelerated to 2.5 a week in 2023, according to a report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University released last November.

More than 130 papers have closed or merged in 2023, and the country lost a third of its papers since 2005. Over half of counties in the United States have one or no local news outlets. AI has and will further create news deserts.

AI cannot and will not replace us.