We are 100 Percent Human and Zero Percent AI

I am proud that the McKinley Park News has always been and remains a publication and resource by humans, for humans.

We employ absolutely no “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) or related services, or to our knowledge services derived from them, for producing the news and running our business and platform. This has been the case for years as we were one of the earliest to identify and raise the alarm about AI exploitation of journalism.

In addition to being a victim of AI theft as a primary reason why we won’t use it, we have many others.

Pedophile Clown

AI lies to you. With confidence and assurance, AI will present dangerous falsehoods and absolute fabulisms as concrete fact, as AI has neither means of telling you when it doesn’t know something nor controls on generating devastating, realistic lies — not “hallucinations.” AI services, almost always from third parties, are black boxes gamed with in-built biases and laden with greasy exploitation to benefit the outside interests of those third parties, quite often at users’ expense.

Using AI for news is like having a convicted serial pedophile as a top anonymous source for your child abuse scandal story, and then asking him to be the ombudsman for your Kids section and the clown at your holiday party. AI like this has no place in journalism, either as a resource for reporting or a tool for generating content, simply because you can’t know or trust it.

Bubbly Creek Riverboat Casino

AI harms privacy and security. All that stuff you’re telling the chatbot? Guess what: It’s now part of a monstrous, unregulated industry that weaponizes your information against you. Proper newsroom operation and even basic concepts of operational security require confidence in private communication and tools.

Do you think the AI service will keep your secrets? If you do, I have a fantastic opportunity for your investment in the coming Bubbly Creek Riverboat Casino.

Intent to Deceive

AI is bad for news and the news industry. We’re by far not the only ones victimized by AI theft of our work product and livelihoods, including and especially independent news outlets, with all we produce scraped away for others’ benefit with no remuneration, and then used in competing products and services powered by what has been stolen from us.

As the sophistication and hyperreality of AI-powered slop continue to escalate, the difference between facts and convincing lies will continue to crumble, including within AI-using news publications. How can you tell if any news within is legitimate, when who-knows-what was used as the basis for reporting and editing? Meager notices about AI use and tiny AI bylines are just camouflage with an intent to deceive.

Journalism is supposed to serve audiences, not trick them. The only way to be a trustworthy and ethical news outlet is not to use AI services at all.

Cosplay Seals

AI is environmentally devastating. What happened to all of those pledges of green operations from tech companies? How about environmental commitment from media? Poof! They’re gone. The ridiculously gigantic resource consumption of AI now inspires both massive expansion of carbon-belching power sources and higher electricity prices for us all.

However, I’ve still never seen a news outlet address the extra environmental harm caused by its use of AI, and this is certainly never an issue for AI’s sycophantic cheerleaders who have taken over journalism schools and “support” organizations.

If you’re an AI-using news outlet that pretends to have any stance of environmental responsibility or concern, you’d probably make yourselves more useful through cosplay as seals in the path of the Canadian seal hunt.

Stupid Junkies

AI makes you dull and dependent. AI services are designed for profit and addiction, offloading your critical thinking and executive decision-making to, ultimately, some tech bro who is scheming how he can exploit you more and keep you coming back.

The basic reasoning that is required for everyday news reporting and production is a key element of editorial independence: to ensure that the news outlet steers its own direction for what news to publish and how to report and produce it, and as a fundamental element of the means of production (i.e. “owning your press”).

The native dumbness of AI blunts the newsroom: removing human direction and audience service, and harming reporting, as AI is unable to tell the difference between legitimate outliers that often make good news and made-up garbage that AI presents confidently as fact.

A news outlet that requires AI service in order to function is nothing better than a stupid junkie spewing lies to stay hooked on criminal product peddled by exploitative jerks.

Good AI?

Can there be good use of AI in journalism and news publishing? I think this might be possible, but absolutely not in our current regime of AI exploitation, misuse and theft.

Astute readers will note our recent classified ad – For Sale: AI Training Data – as well as related background in our Forums. This is inspired by our desire to stake out a stance against our continued victimization by AI, as well as a hope that there might be scenarios for responsible use.

Model Collapse

Our human-centric, original, accurate, continually refreshed, grammatically correct news content is of extremely high value to the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power AI, especially as they face “model collapse” by eating too much of their own automatically generated slop.

Licensing our valuable training data should be a revenue stream for us, but unlike the big players who are getting paid, everything we’ve done and do is scraped and stolen away. Legal use and licensing would also allow us to control our AI training data: both to ensure that it’s in our good business interest and employed in a responsible and ethical manner.

Trust and Ethics

As for news production, honestly, many top-of-mind tasks could likely be performed through straightforward — and more efficient — “automation” instead of AI. One case for AI might be how we produce neighborhood Crime Reports, Notable Arrests and Building Permits that are easy to access, read and understand. However, primary issues of trust and ethics remain no matter what AI tool we might practically employ.

For example, I trust that everything in the McKinley Park News is factually accurate, and I’d have confidence about using AI for research and production were our news the basis for its training data. However, even though the McKinley Park News has published tens of thousands of web pages of content and hundreds of thousands of words or more of original writing, this isn’t nearly enough for an LLM to power an AI service. It requires massively more content — that’s almost always stolen and so big it’s impossible to know what’s inside.

No Hope From Our “Help”

The news publishing community might collaborate on its own corpus of high-quality, trustworthy AI news training data, girded with other responsibly sourced resources, such as properly licensed or out-of-copyright content. This could be an ethical AI tool and even generate revenue for contributing publishers.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this or other meaningful collaboration happening soon, as corrupt institutions like Medill and LION Publishers advocate for AI theft against the industry they supposedly serve, resource-consuming interlopers like Public Narrative shatter good and effective things like the Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA), supposed saviors like Press Forward remain a bad joke performed by guilty-feeling rich people, and no effective organization by and for professional journalists exists at all.

Never Capable

I have toyed with the idea of implementing our own AI, on our own on-site or cloud server. However, even investigating this takes time away from local news, and for a project that would likely still end up environmentally unsound and built on stolen goods.

If we ever do employ AI for news production, rest assured that we’ll implement it in a responsible manner and disclose to you, dear reader, what we’ve done and how and where it’s employed. However, I don’t ever see AI being capable of making editorial decisions that embody sound journalism and prioritize service to our news audience and community.

By Humans, For Humans

Our decision to avoid AI is part of the chain of trust that binds all our editorial, platform and business operations. Unlike too many other publications, we serve news readers like you, rather than treating you as a product. Part of this means eschewing untrustworthy, corrupted and unethical sources like AI.

We are and remain a publication by humans, for humans.

— Justin Kerr, Publisher
McKinley Park News