Last weekend I went down to the Warwick Economics Summit, a student-run conference looking to present to students the biggest debates in the world. The constant theme that ran through all the speakers’ talks, from Jon Slade of the Financial Times (FT) to Nathan Sheets of Citigroup, was the constant discussion of AI.
I mean, fair enough. There does appear to be an AI undertone to every conversation that concerns the future in any professional field. That was felt at this summit. There was no question about the ethics, the impact it has on cognitive development, or the environmental consequences (which it has proven to be detrimental to all… by the way). There was not even a debate about implementation or the mutual coalition. It was almost as if there was a hidden premise that AI was here, we know what it is, what we are getting, and that the only question is how we can best utilise it. Not a thought or consideration of the purpose of using it.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the majority of the talks at the Summit included AI in some form or another. Philippe Aghion, the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, had a section of his long talk on the usage of AI in his prize-winning economic model. Nathan Sheets, a chief economist at Citigroup, talked about the crucial impact AI investment had on the US’s growth. However, it was when Jon Slade, CEO of the Financial Times, kicked off the weekend with his talk about the mutual benefit of AI and the journalism industry, that the infiltration of AI into our perception of industries of the future started to feel a little dystopian to me.
That’s right, a person who is supposed to be representing the journalists he manages over, actively encouraging the thing that is limiting the creative expression of writers, artists, and by extension journalists. Mr Slade was not a journalist himself, he comes from a background of business development, working his way up to the top of the FT.
He started his speech off with a case study he performed. He used 4 different AI models and compared if they could regurgitate the FT’s lead story headline when asked what it was on that specific day. Only 1 of the models, ChatGPT, was able to give the correct answer (This is particularly concerning considering 6% of all news sourcing comes from AI). Great, thanks for proving the unreliability of AI. However, he then continued his speech by demonstrating that AI can, and will be, a mutually beneficial thing to both journalism and AI.
He referred to this graph (see above). It is titled: ‘An economic flywheel for information in an AI world.’ The concept is simple. According to Mr Slade, strong journalism and AI mutually benefit each other. When looking at the way AI gains its information, the idea that journalism benefits AI seems clear. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, are able to give you the information they produce through what is basically bottom trawling fishing. Scraping the seabed for any information they can get their hands on. AI is therefore a product of journalism – good, true, factual, creative, honest journalism – regurgitated and reproduced to give an overview of the topic you have requested. However, it does not go the other way.
The ‘Quality data’ presumption on the flywheel is there on the idea that is something only AI can produce. That we need AI to give quality data. It is there, forgetting that this is the job of journalists. It has always been the role of journalists to produce the facts that inform citizens, and then let them decide for themselves. Giving the facts for you to inform your opinions.
However, with AI, it forms your opinion for you. AI is cradled as complete efficiency and productivity, laying out all the facts faster than any human can collate them. Therefore we are more likely to accept the information it gives us as fact. And AI is proven to hold biases, so our opinions are not only someone (something) else’s but also susceptible to manipulation.
But this was not the thought of the Summit. The usage of AI was almost implied in many conversations. After coming out of the talk with the CFO of Nestle, Anna Manz, one of the first things a student from the University of Warwick asked me was: ‘Do you use AI to write your essays since you study Politics?’ After replying ‘no’ with a tone of disgust, the follow up was: ‘but it is just so easy, and it takes so much effort to not use AI.’
It appeared that my anti-AI agenda was the minority at this summit. Between attendees, panelists and speakers, I felt so isolated in my rebellion against offloading my thoughts and opinions to these machines.
As a student journalist, the line between AI implementation and overreach is frightening. If we continue our path towards complete dependency, the prospects of my future, doing what I love, begins to look in more and more jeopardy. I think this is what many fail to understand when it comes to AI. Especially within the talk that Jon Slade did. AI delegitimises journalists, and therefore delegitimises our voice. Yet, for the vast majority of us, this is not just a hobby but our lives. We get into this profession for our desire to make our words mean something, and therefore we love what we do.
I guess, it’s the love of what we do that distinguishes the two sides of the AI debate. When your passion for the subject does not surpass your tolerance for AI it is obvious that you will succumb yourself to a visit to the ChatGPT website. And in doing so, you voluntarily give yourself up to the hands of AI.
Yes, this article is just me hating on AI. Yet I believe it talks to a louder concern that the passion for not using AI is dwindling. That my anti-AI agenda, however frivolous, can still somewhat be meaningful to my passions and despite the continued descent into an AI-centric world, there is still meaning within being anti-AI.
