AI can produce the routine stuff quickly and consistently
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The Wall Street Journal recently published an oped article written by a regular contributor using AI. That set off a global debate on whether opinion-makers should use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write articles. Our columnist TCA Srinivasa Raghavan asked ChatGPT to weigh in on the matter in the form of a 650 word article, written in his style. Here’s the output:There is a curious new anxiety doing the rounds in newspaper offices: that artificial intelligence might write articles.This is apparently a bad thing.I have never quite understood why.Newspapers have spent decades getting machines to do almost everything except write the article. They use computers to receive copy, edit it, transmit it, lay it out, print it and distribute it. They use software to count words, check spelling, track readership and tell editors which stories people are reading.But the moment somebody suggests that a machine might help write the words, journalists suddenly discover the sanctity of human creativity.This is rather like railway employees objecting to electric trains because steam locomotives have souls.The first objection is that AI cannot write as well as a good journalist.Quite right. Neither can most journalists.The second is that AI will eventually replace journalists. Possibly. But that is not an argument against using it. It is an argument for becoming better at journalism. At least in principle.There is an important distinction here: between reporting and writing.Reporting is what makes journalism journalism. Finding something out, persuading somebody to talk, discovering the document nobody else has seen, noticing that two apparently unrelated facts are related, understanding the significance of a number and asking the question everybody else was too lazy to ask — these are human activities.Writing the resulting 600 words is not necessarily one of them.So why should the first draft of an article be sacred? It isn’t.What matters is whether the article is true, useful and interesting.Editing mattersThis is where the argument against AI becomes particularly odd. Nobody seriously proposes that journalists should publish whatever they write without editing. Every decent newspaper has layers of checking between the reporter and the reader.The answer to all these problems is the same: editing.The real danger is not that AI will write newspaper stories. The real danger is that newspapers will use AI badly.Consider a reporter receiving a 400-page government report. Somebody has to read it, search it, extract the tables, compare them with last year’s numbers and identify what has changed.AI can do much of that donkey work in minutes. That does not mean the machine has written the story. It means the journalist has been given something journalists desperately need: time.A good reporter should spend less time copying numbers from page 137 of a PDF and more time asking why those numbers have changed.AI can produce the routine stuff quickly and consistently. That leaves human beings to do the difficult stuff.Of course there is a catch. Editors will have to edit. This sounds obvious, but nobody seems to have thought it through.If AI produces a draft, somebody has to decide whether it is good enough. Somebody has to check the facts. Somebody has to understand the subject. Somebody has to know what has been omitted.In other words, AI does not eliminate the need for editors. It makes good editors more important.And perhaps that is what really frightens people.Nobody is suggesting that the editorial page should be written by a toaster. But a 250-word report on a routine corporate earnings announcement does not acquire moral value merely because a human being typed it.The reader wants to know what happened. The reader does not care whether the first draft was produced by an intern, a sub-editor, a reporter sitting in a cab or a large language model sitting in a data centre somewhere. The reader cares whether it is right. That, ultimately, is the test newspapers should apply.Not: Was this written by AI? But: Is this good journalism?If the answer is yes, refusing to publish it because a machine helped produce it would be rather like refusing to use a calculator because arithmetic should be done by hand.There is a word for that. Stupid.Published on August 29, 2026
