Not actually intelligent

Considering so-called AI, journalism and human expression, as one newspaper tells its reporters to quit writing and let chatbots handle it.

During the Hollywood writers’ strike of 2023, David Simon participated in an interview with NPR’s Ari Shapiro where he offered a blunt retort to Shapiro’s suggestion that so-called AI (which is not actually intelligent) would have been invaluable when Simon was writing “The Wire” earlier in the century.

SHAPIRO: …If you’re trying to transition from Scene 5 to Scene 6 and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition.

SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.

This is my sentiment as well, even as I concede that higher-level computing power behind certain digital tools (which are not actually intelligent) can be helpful to the process of gathering and writing news.

A year has passed since I started writing for the Albuquerque Journal. I hope to continue as long as I can continue writing and not merely serve as an administrative assistant to a chatbot. This is, sadly, how the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer seems to view the future of journalism.

But in fairness to Chris Quinn, my perspective opens up a vexing question in this industry, to which I am something of an invader, having bypassed journalism school altogether and picked up the proverbial notepad in middle age.

Quinn wrote a “letter from the editor” in the Plain Dealer last week, tucked behind a paywall here, shaking his head because a recent J-school grad turned him down for a job when she found out she would not actually be expected to write anything.

That’s because the Plain Dealer has escalated its use of high-power computing and digital parrots in the newsroom, to the point where reporters are asked to feed their research, notes and interview transcripts into a computer that drafts the articles for them.

By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.

(Chris Quinn, Cleveland Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com, 16 Feb 2026)

Quinn is not wrong to embrace newsroom tools that can support human journalists.

Computers can provide us with searchable transcripts of our interviews. They can sift through vast amounts of data and rapidly provide analyses and identify patterns. The digital parrots can generate suggestions for questions, summarize public meetings the reporter could not attend in order to find good stories and important local reporting, identify public records to help reporters hone their public records requests, and more.

The Plain Dealer also appears to be maintaining appropriate human checks on what its digital technology is producing ahead of publication.

It is simultaneously true that AI is overhyped, being forced down our throats by its developers and that companies are adopting it faster than industries can prepare the labor force for the disruptions that are coming; and that it is developing technologies that could, if properly contained and managed, support human endeavor.

Yet the Plain Dealer’s approach devalues the human enterprise of thinking critically, making associations between ideas and historical events, and artfully composing an article suited for its length and mode of journalism, whether it is a metro news report, an investigative piece, opinion essay, business profile or longer magazine-length story.

For the Plain Dealer, writing is an administrative chore. This is not augmentation, but automation.

The writing matters

Quinn’s piece rubbishes journalism school for allegedly teaching students that “AI is evil” (an assertion journalism schools would deny) but mainly, it seems, because some of them are still teaching their students how to write.

A man, not a bot, wrote this sentence in the March Atlantic:

Mainframes are like Christopher Walken: They’ve been going nonstop since the 1960s, they’re fantastic at performing peculiar roles (processing payments, safeguarding data), and nobody alive really understands how they work.

(Josh Tyrangiel, “What’s the worst that could happen? AI and the future of work,” in The Atlantic of March 2026)

It’s a funny joke, but it’s also color, a human perspective on a particular technology indicative of how humans think about their world. Tyrangiel wrote an essay about AI that AI, not being human or actually intelligent, could not produce.

It’s not just that writing is fun and writers would feel sad over losing it. What Quinn is missing, I submit, is why human writing matters and why reading (which, here, includes listening to oral reading) matters. The writing and reading are inextricable to the thinking process.

This means I’m suggesting news writing is a literary and intellectual endeavor to an extent that some reporters and editors would resist.

Newsrooms are not writers’ salons. They are fast-moving, business-like, profanity-laden workplaces where decisions are made quickly, stories are chopped for print, where reporters in the field sometimes convey facts to a rewrite guy at the news desk who hammers out a story for deadline.

There is not a lot of sentimentality about the craft of writing, yet there is a great deal of attention placed on the craft, of writing an effective and accurate story that punches without moving beyond solid reporting or the limits of defamation claims. The writing matters even in the hard-assed newsroom of past times.

Human development

My own entry to journalism was not through J-school, but via my ability to write, my curiosity, and my willingness to learn the trade and methods of researching, interviewing, gathering material and writing effectively. This has changed me and developed my capacities.

The young journalist who turned down that job at the Plain Dealer likely recognized the gig as a dead end that offered her no opportunity to grow, and she made a wise decision to pass it up.

Readers deserve opportunities to grow, as well. News writing should not be a chore to read, but a new vocabulary word here or there, some increased civic knowledge, a perspective on an issue other than their own, contributes to the reader’s growth.

“Why bother reading something that someone else couldn’t be bothered to write?” asks journalist Mic Wright in his newsletter, “Conquest of the Useless,” last week, adding on the subject of writing: “Writing is the point at which you knit together what you’ve found out and work out what it means. It’s in the writing that you find the spine of a story.”

The same piece also skewers the gospel of efficiency used to promote AI journalism: “AI is the ultimate union-busting tool. The AI doesn’t ask for a pay rise, need maternity leave, or object to blatant political interference from the proprietor or the advertisers.”

Dancing animals

The late author Kurt Vonnegut may now be better known for a 2005 PBS interview than for his novels, including even his landmark 1969 work, “Slaughterhouse Five.”

This is because of highly circulated posts on vanity apps excerpting remarks he made about in-person shopping that seem prescient now that McDonalds insists you use a touch screen to order food, supermarkets are once again pushing self-checkout machines, and more and more customer service is being relegated to chatbots.

You may have seen these quotations more than once. They tend to make the rounds in cycles. It starts with Vonnegut telling his wife he’s going out to buy some envelopes at a store:

Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know…

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

(Kurt Vonnegut on “Now on PBS” in 2005)

I’m watching the world of my senior years develop in which, increasingly, I will have no choice but to interact with chatbots and machines instead of other people. I’m no extrovert. I find solitude restful and healing. But I like to come out of my hut and enter the village. I like movie theaters, cafes, pubs, book shops.

I suspect, when the novelty fades and it’s no longer remarkable that someone can produce realistic simulacra of human actors or prose passing as human-generated, most people don’t really want a world where human expression is left to machines, novels are “generated” by software and non-human digital “actresses” perform dramatic roles.

Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe it will turn out people don’t care as much about human expression, human knowledge, or human products. Maybe most will be perfectly happy listening to music, reading articles and watching movies (streaming into their homes or on their phones rather than in a cinema) produced digitally with humans reduced to maintaining the computers and payment processing.

But not me. The jury is out on whether I’m actually intelligent — certainly, there are Journal readers eager to inform me I am not. The day I’m asked to surrender my writing and thinking process to a computer, I’m not going to put a gun in my mouth. I will push back against the automation and digitization of everything; and I’m going to write, shout, dance and enjoy life until I die.