On my third day as a rookie reporter at the daily Napa Register, my editor handed me a copy of a competing paper. On the front page was a story circled in red: Two Napa residents had been injured in a boating accident on a nearby lake.
“Rewrite it,” yelled the editor.
When he spoke, he would bark or growl depending on how he felt that day.
I quickly typed out an article using information I had gleaned from other news articles, and as I placed the typed pages in the editor's basket, he asked grumpily, “Did you check everything?”
I had attributed that detail to a competitor's article. But verify it? You can imagine how quickly I pulled the page from my basket.
After two calls to the police, I filed an amended story indicating that the accident occurred at a different location on the lake and much earlier in the day, both of which were confirmed by police.
Years later, when I became a shouting editor myself, I earned a reputation for quickly pushing back a story if something didn't look right, a reputation I continued while teaching college journalism.
Then came the Internet and Wikipedia.
In a classroom filled with computers, my students diligently worked on the stories I assigned them. They submitted pieces filled with rich details taken directly from Wikipedia. In the early days, they trusted that anything on the Internet was bound to be accurate.
It didn’t take much for them to dismiss that, especially when their work was going to be graded. But when we made them write under tight deadlines, they were tempted to simply cut and paste paragraphs from internet sources as if they were their own.
The lesson learned from that is that it was simply plagiarism.
There's a cliché in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, find out.” My late mother never thought that was particularly funny, but she understood that a journalist's default mode of thinking is, and should be, skepticism.
While working at the newspaper, I got a tearful phone call early one morning from a woman who told me that her husband had just died in a car accident out of state. She wanted the newspaper to run an obituary, providing information about the accident and her husband's life. But as she spoke, I heard the unmistakable sound of ice clinking in a glass, which aroused my suspicions.
Ice? At 7 in the morning? That afternoon, I called to confirm the details of the accident and learned that her late husband had not been late. He was alive. And the couple was getting a divorce.
All of this happened before artificial intelligence became available, and it represents the latest challenge news organizations face every day as they strive to deliver accurate and truthful reporting.
In a “Pub Chat” column last week, Finger Lakes Times Publisher Mike Catillo described how AI has been misused at a Wyoming newspaper: AI is now sometimes used as a substitute for accuracy, rather than “if your mother says she loves you, check it” style journalism.
The more I read about AI, the more I realize that if that soon-to-be divorcee swirling that block of ice could, in one way or another, use an AI program today to create an official-looking obituary, as if it had been written by a real funeral director. Such documents are routinely made public, and no one has any reason to doubt whether the person was really dead or not.
It’s no wonder that many journalists say AI is a threat.
It's big and far-reaching, and it will take focus and dedication to find a way to embrace it. In the meantime, you'll hear me groan.
