A generation or two ago, a child conceived out of wedlock could remain a family’s best kept secret for decades. I personally faced a surprising and tearful admission from my mother in early adulthood; it turned out she didn’t know who my father was.
The dad who raised me — angry at the thought of his wife’s infidelity — said he wanted this matter quieted and unexplored.
But accessible DNA testing services like 23 & Me have offered many people (myself included) answers about their unknown origins.
People digging for genealogical answers often discover upsetting information. But having it offers them power to weigh risks and decide their next steps. When journalists use the emerging technologies of artificial intelligence, they can provide similar benefits to the populations they serve.
In his book, “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism,” Francesco Marconi argues that the use of AI in journalism may “uncover corruption” and expose truths which he says can “contribute to a more informed society.”
Journalists should become familiar with and implement the AI technologies currently at their disposal; doing so not only enables greater checks on power, but also keeps journalists aware of the risks of using these new technologies, and thus positions the fourth estate to voice vital cautions about them moving forward.
“Spotlight,” a 2015 film that chronicles The Boston Globe’s 2002 coverage of rampant sexual abuse cover-up within Boston’s archdiocese, offers a poignant scene where investigative journalists comb meticulously through encyclopedic records. Their eyes follow a ruler down the page, line by tedious line, to track their progress and piece together the chronic reassignment of abusive priests to new locations — and new victims.
Marconi, among others, considers how today’s technologies can be used to find leads in large datasets that he says might ordinarily be impossibly cumbersome. One can imagine the appeal similar technologies would have offered reporters at The Boston Globe.
But in his 2024 article, “Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena,” Felix Simon counters that this use of AI to interrogate large amounts of data is far from ready to stand alone. He strikes a middle of the road position, arguing that “the effects of AI will neither be as dire as the doomsayers predict, nor as utopian as the enthusiasts hope.”
Marconi refers to AI as “just another tool in the editorial Swiss Army knife,” but he also refers to AI “systems” and explains that “computers are not like simple tools. They need to be trained.” Understanding AIs as systems — and not merely neutral tools — helps us get at a major concern with their use: as Marconi says, “these systems will inevitably reflect the bias in the training and prototypes used to develop them.”
Just as journalists in recent years have examined systemic racism in our institutions, Marconi argues that journalists can probe the unseen biases of algorithmic systems by experimenting with their outputs and reporting the results to the public.
In a lecture at Harvard Extension School in February of 2026, Martha Nichols complimented this idea, adding that experiments with AI can even act as a mirror for the biases of “human writers.”
Because today’s AI includes entire systems and not just tools, journalists need to use and understand these technologies. But why not create our own systems, built on the core ethics of journalistic practice?
Simon argues that the resources necessary often make the “independent development” of such tools unrealistic for newsrooms, forcing “dependence” on what he calls “platform AI.” He worries that “control over infrastructure confers power,” and he says the use of such tools may introduce conflicting “priorities.”
Although Simon warns that large tech companies may monopolize AI systems, he, along with Marconi, believes that journalists can contribute to conversations about these systems. Holding the powerful to account can be done by using AI to discover breaches of the public’s interests, but it must also be done by rigorously examining the outputs of powerful AIs.
In 2024 Cyrus Farivar argued that “the future of AI-assisted journalism [is] already here” — and I agree. Those of us just entering this career or waking up to the debates surrounding the use of AI are not the visionaries of today’s technological or journalistic landscape. We are responding to what we have inherited. As Marconi asserts, we ought to use and understand new technology in order to shape public understanding of its capacities and limitations. The tools and systems of AI are like a library — full of books both helpful and controversial, none of which should be banned.
As journalists, let’s not ban the use of AI, but continue to critically explore all it has to offer.
Acknowledgement: I am indebted to class discussions and conversations with my husband, a computer programmer, in the formation of my opinions presented herein.