When I hear newspaper journalists praising AI use and AI tools as the very future of journalism, I become deeply sceptical and disheartened, and intuitively understand that the days of the independent pen are numbered.

No one can stop progress, we know. What has once been invented cannot be uninvented. AI is here to stay. For the time being, most journalists still put their names beneath the articles they are, in principle, responsible for and are supposed to have written. It is soon time to stop doing so.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

In many places, they actually write very little themselves and allow AI to do most of the writing and thinking, as we heard from the newspaper Firda’s representative on NRK’s morning broadcast on Sunday. The paper’s journalist praised the AI tool to the skies and was unaware that she was, for all practical purposes, throwing herself out with the bathwater.

The same was true of Skjalg Fjellheim (Nettavisen), although not quite so unreservedly. He is too experienced, too adept at power, and too media-savvy for that. But he knows as well as I do where we find ourselves at this moment.

Mass dissemination of AI

AI today authors far more of what people read in newspapers and media than most realise. And in books, for that matter. The tool is not really new, but is now fully developed and designed to take over most tasks in newspapers, media, and information work in general.

Over the past year alone, its use has spread like wildfire. Every newsroom now relies heavily on AI tools—I was about to say even Document (which, it should be noted, still employs genuine writers who use AI only as an aid).

Letting AI do everything

There is, of course, a difference between using AI as a tool to quickly obtain data and detailed information that would otherwise take ten times longer to gather, and allowing AI to create the entire story—the entire article—for you.

Many are now choosing the latter. All one needs to do, simply put, is ask a few questions and issue a few commands, and the work is done. “There is money to be saved here,” I hear from boardrooms.

What will readers say?

One of the questions becomes, knowing full well that the age of AI has long since arrived and will soon dominate us completely:

What will the public say about this imperceptible change on the day they realise that the newspaper they have been reading was not written by any journalist—not written by any human being—but by AI, with the journalist sitting beside it as a kind of uncertified driving instructor? How will the reader react?

I shall leave that answer open.

Content and soul neglected

During the previous media revolution, the transition to the internet and online newspapers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the quality of newspapers that suffered and, in many cases, was wholly sacrificed on the altar of the new age. Major newspapers such as Dagbladet and VG lost hundreds of thousands of regular buyers over the course of just a few years.

They had control of the technology but took far too lightly the professional and content-related aspects of the transition from print to digital. So it is now as well, I fear more than ever, with the transition to AI-generated journalism from A to Z. The content itself, and the lack of soul, are being sacrificed on the altar of AI progress.

Flesh and blood

Many owners in the media industry will naturally see an opportunity to save considerable expense when far fewer journalists can effortlessly produce the “same product”.

Few newspaper boards will have the backbone to say no, even though they surely know that it will not in fact be the same product. The first was created by “flesh and blood”, by a will and a pen; the second by a “machine”, a computer brain, fed with a small sprinkling of intellectual feed, a few words and a few questions.

The last article—soon written

I remember reading Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” in my youth, an ironic vision of the future about a man who invents a machine that writes exactly the right thing, exactly what you want it to write, automatically, simply by feeding it correctly. With that machine, “everyone” could become a famous author and sell millions of books.

Dahl wrote that eerily accurate vision of the future in 1953. Today it stands crystal clear that the Norwegian-British author came close to being 100 per cent prophetic in a story that most people probably never took entirely seriously. Not until now, seventy-three years after Dahl wrote his masterful vision.

That last point is the most unsettling of all. In a very short time, AI-generated journalism has become more or less dominant in our newspapers and in the media generally. We have now reached the point where we crossed the Rubicon long ago—there is no way back. The only thing we can do is keep a firm grip on the reins for as long as possible before everything goes off the rails. That will not be long now. I dare say that the “last article” will soon have been written, as we understand the concept of “writing”.