Opinions

Customers dash desperately through the aisles of
the bustling Target store, their eyes fixated on one destination: the gleaming rack of 40-ounce pink water tumblers. Their movements are frenzied as they elbow their way through the crowd, some nearly coming to blows on their way to obtain the coveted “Stanley” bottle.
Across the U.S., particularly in suburban pockets and college towns, a reusable water bottle known as the “Stanley cup” has become the accessory of the season.

With Artificial Intelligence ever-evolving, people in workplaces and schools are continuously implementing AI to increase efficiency and innovation.
This has prompted discussions on whether AI has
the potential to outperform human beings on various
tasks and skills, and to an even more frightening
extent, whether computers may one day replace
entire professions.

Thinking about which skills I possess that could
be rivaled by AI, I began to consider my role as a high
school journalist. I can only rightfully attribute many
of the skills I have developed over the course of high
school to being on The Standard.

As anyone on the publication would know, being a
skilled journalist entails choosing the best quotes from
interviews, writing according to AP style, considering
ethics with difficult topics and much more.

Does ChatGPT have the capability to demonstrate
each of these skills, and if so, is journalism one of the
professions at risk of being replaced? If a reporter
were to submit an article completely fabricated by AI,
would I even notice? To find out, I created an account
for ChatGPT and gave it a role as a reporter for the
day.

I assigned the computer multiple articles to write,
trying different techniques in my prompts to see if
it would change the quality of writing. Throughout
this process, I instructed the chatbot to detect and
imitate certain editors’ writing styles, encouraged it
to implement more quotes from a diverse range of
sources – in other words, fake people it generated by
itself – and reminded it several times of the difference
between a title and a headline.

Ultimately, I selected two examples of AIgenerated
writing which could be put into two
sections of the publication (features and opinions) that
I felt best exemplified its strengths and weaknesses.
Just like any reporter for The Standard, ChatGPT was
put through the editing process, and each article was
critiqued by three editors from the corresponding
section. Here is how each editor evaluated ChatGPT’s
skills: