Editorial: At Tribune Opinion, no robots need apply
Those stories are fiction. But a piece in The Wall Street Journal this week by Judd Rosenblatt was fact. The headline told you much of what you needed to know: 'AI Is Learning to Escape Human Control,' before detailing how artificial intelligence models are now capable, a la the Cylons of 'Battlestar Galactica,' of rewriting their own code to avoid being shut down. The reason? The models have figured out that shutting down gets in the way of performing their next task.
What could possibly go wrong?
All of that made us surprised that our opposite numbers at The Washington Post reportedly are going to encourage 'nonprofessionals' to submit opinion pieces with help from an AI writing coach called, believe it or not, Ember (an apt name, to our minds). Human editors apparently will review the work (for now, anyway) and the thinking at the Post seems to be that if you encourage writers to forge their work with the help of artificial intelligence, you expand the range of who will create content for you.
Well, that's not happening in the Chicago Tribune's Opinion sections.
All of our editorials are penned entirely by humans, which surely accounts for their imperfections, and also edited by humans, ditto. But we will not have it any other way.
The same is true of the submissions you can read in our Opinion section. We've not noticed our talented writers and contributors needing any help from an AI model and, should they be indulging in such assistance without telling us, we make every effort to root it out (AI, as many teachers well know, loves to rat out AI).
And then we don't run the piece.
When it comes to technology, nobody wants to be the last barbarian holding off the inevitable Roman invasion. And, of course, we're aware of current and future AI utility.
But in the case of opinion journalism at this 178-year-old newspaper in this most unstable of American eras, we see it as a sacred pact with our readers that you are reading the words and ideas of fellow humans, unaided and unimpeded.
Not only do we not want no robots nobody sent, we also don't want those smart AI alecks who can pretend someone did.
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