A late entry in the contest for Ironic Headline of the Week showed up at Fox News a couple of days ago. The title of the article gets right to the gist of the matter. “Newspaper runs robot-written op-ed opposing AI in journalism.” Fox News claims that the article was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the op-ed was written entirely by Microsoft’s Bing Chat AI system. (See the disclaimer at the end of this piece to see why I used the word “claims.”) It sounded like an interesting experiment and the excerpts from the op-ed provided in the linked article certainly could have passed for an opinion piece written by a human being. So could Bing Chat be arguing itself out of a job? Let’s find out.

A St. Louis newspaper decided to take on the artificial intelligence debate by allowing a robot to pen an op-ed arguing against the use of AI in journalism.

The article, featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was written entirely by Microsoft’s Bing Chat AI program, according to a disclaimer in the article.

The bot was instructed to “write a newspaper editorial arguing that artificial intelligence should not be used in journalism.”

The op-ed explores a number of aspects of journalism and cites significant differences between the inherent abilities of human beings and an AI algorithm. It states that using AI for journalistic purposes might have some benefits, but it could also pose dangers to the “quality, integrity, and ethics of journalism.”

As I already stated, the program makes some completely valid arguments. One of the most damning claims was that AI could undermine people’s faith and trust in the credibility of journalism. (And one could argue that human journalists today are already doing too much of that as it is.) Bing accuses itself of being able to create fake news and generate misinformation. It also pointed out that AI can create deepfakes that might intentionally mislead the public and lead to lawsuits.

Bing also delves into some of the unique characteristics of the human mind that AI can’t replicate. For example, it says that humans have the ability to make moral distinctions between what is right and wrong, something that AI cannot do. Bing also said that it lacks the passion, curiosity, and creativity that humans inject into their writing.

But the most damning and obvious observation that Bing makes deals with the fundamental definition of “journalism.” The primary thrust of mainstream journalism involves gathering news and reporting on it. Bing is trapped in a box and has no ability to make observations of current events or interview people unless they log in to talk to it. It can’t “report” on anything unless some human being has already reported on it first and the article is available in its library. More broadly, breaking news is original by definition. AI can’t create anything original. It can only stitch together text that humans have previously written.

The same could be said for opinion pieces such as the one in question. None of those comments were Bing’s own “opinions” because it doesn’t have any opinions. It can only scan the opinions of people who have previously written about any given subject and assemble them into something that appears new, but is actually just an exercise in collaborative plagiarism. We can extend that concept further and accurately say that if we shift over to using AI for all forms of writing, whether it is journalism or creative literature, there will never again be anything truly new or unique written. Everything would simply be a mix-and-match salad of what came before. And that’s possibly one of the more frightening things about Artificial Intelligence that we’ve come across thus far.

DISCLAIMER: Frustratingly, the Fox News article did not provide a link to the actual op-ed in question. I checked the front page of the Post-Dispatch and then conducted a search for the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” but was unable to find any such article. This left me unsure whether not the story was real or if this was a case where Fox News asked an AI program to write a fake news story about an AI program. But I asked the Opinion Editor at the Post-Dispatch for clarification and Kevin McDermott assured me that the article is real and it ran on September 16th. Here’s the link. But my original inability to locate the source material seems like another example of the uncertainty we’re already experiencing now that Artificial Intelligence has been unleashed upon the world.