Journalism and Astrophysics
I have now read Minas Karamanis' text The machines are fine. I'm worried about us (after a tip from Jan Ainali) and think there are several things we journalists can think about when reading it. Especially journalists, editorial managers and media managers who want to use AI for this and that.
The text is initially about Alice and Bob, two PhD students who are to solve two astrophysics-related problems. Alice grinds away as if it were 2021 and publishes an article drenched in sweat and tears, while Bob spends his time prompting an AI and publishes an equivalent article. Everyone is happy: the PhD students get their hats, the funders get their articles, the institution gets continued funding. Everyone except astrophysicist Minas Karamanis: "We have built an entire evaluation system around counting things that can be counted, and it turns out that what actually matters is the one thing that can't be."
I won't recount the entire text, but this is an interesting passage:
(…) in astrophysics, people are always the ends, never the means. (…) Nobody's life depends on the precise value of the Hubble constant. No policy changes if the age of the Universe turns out to be 13.77 billion years instead of 13.79. Unlike medicine, where a cure for Alzheimer's would be invaluable regardless of whether a human or an AI discovered it, astrophysics has no clinical output. The results, in a strict practical sense, don't matter. What matters is the process of getting them: the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.
What are you and your editorial team counting?
Are you an astrophysicist or brain researcher in your journalistic work?
It's easy to think that we're all brain researchers – that it's the publication that counts since it's what the public consumes, what your audience subscribes to and clicks on. That journalism happens in the production of an article or a segment. With that perspective, media managers can see their employees as interchangeable; as long as the publishing output is filled, enough journalism is being done.
What then is journalism's astrophysics? What would it look like if the important thing happens within us?
I'm thinking of an interview with Siri I did for the documentary series Ätstört Internet. The series was to be about compulsory care for people with anorexia, and in the interview, Siri describes her ongoing illness and her experiences from the healthcare. After a while, she mentions how "recovery accounts" pull her back into the eating disorder as soon as she's on her way out. I had never heard of such accounts, and she shows some on her phone – accounts on Youtube and Instagram where people seem to tell about their journey toward recovering from their eating disorders, but which more often show how to continue being sick and thereby remain in the community of other sick people.
When Siri showed everything on her phone, something happened in my journalist body, and the following weeks I waded through recovery content on the internet. Soon I had built a small skeleton of understanding, one that I could not only dress in interviews with Siri and others (the documentary series came to be entirely about recovery accounts), but which later helped me in all kinds of contexts, and which exists in me together with other small skeletons from other documentary projects. It's no coincidence that many of my documentaries are about young people who come to harm (it's not a fetish either, as a friend suggested), but it's because I've become a journalist who understands something after thousands of hours of wading. It has become my galaxy.
The publications are of course not unimportant in the way that results may be unimportant in Minas Karamanis's astrophysics, but the point is how they come into being. It's that becoming that is journalism – the effort behind every letter, the hours behind every insight. Just as Minas writes, you can't tell when an insight will come, it's impossible to know in which interview you finally understand something or in which chat forum you suddenly know what something is actually about. We just have to be there, talk to those we meet, read what we come across, ponder what we think we glimpse late nights when we gaze out at the universe.
We journalists will be able to use AI for incredibly much, and I am doing my best to teach how, but don't ask an LLM to be a journalist for you or your editorial team. Journalism is something else, something we carry in our hearts and want to tell—and AI models have no heart.