Artificial Intelligence in Journalism: The Daily’s Stance
In October 1995, M.J. Milloy — then-Coordinating Editor of The McGill Daily — reached out to former editors asking for a statement on what the Daily meant to them. Joan Mandell (BA 1979), co- founder of Al Fajr, the first Palestinian-produced English-language newspaper in the West Bank, wrote: “The McGill Daily was my college life; it was journalism school run by students at a university that offered no journalism degree. It was the institution through which much of my philosophical, political, aesthetic, literary and social values took shape.”
The Daily has often described itself as just that: an opportunity that enables students to partake in the processes of independent reporting and collaborative editing. Part of the Daily’s mission has always been to encourage students to develop a critical journalistic eye.
Today, the art of refining those “philosophical, political, aesthetic, literary and social values” has been interrupted by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) models that have infiltrated our academic spaces. AI has significantly shaped the way McGill students across various faculties approach learning; whether in drafting, editing, researching, or coding. Hence, McGill, which only has loose guidelines for professors and no enforeceable university-wide policy, faces an epidemic of unconstrained AI usage.
As McGill lacks an academic journalism program, the responsibility of fostering journalistic skills within the student body falls on our campus publications. It is crucial that we, as the Daily, provide a conducive space for our writers to engage with the tools, ethics, and practices that make the field what it is — a public service predicated upon trust between reader and reporter. Therefore, for technical and ethical reasons, the Daily’s editorial board asserts that there is no room for the use of AI models at any stage of the writing or editing process. Our new AI policy, which can be found online in our Statement of Principles, reads:
“The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools by DPS members (i.e. contributors, staff writers, and editors) is forbidden for use at all stages of writing and editing articles for the DPS. This includes but is not limited to the use of AI for:
- The production of sentences
- Grammar checking (e.g. Grammarly and Quillbot)
- Research and Data analysis
- Art (generating or editing illustrations and photos)All written article drafts sent where there is a reasonable suspicion that the author has used AI in the ways outlined in clause 1 have the right to be rejected by the editorial board.If there is reasonable suspicion that a staff writer has used AI, the writer will meet with a member of the editorial board to discuss the future of their position at the Daily.”
The decision to prohibit the use of AI in the production of the Daily‘s articles was influenced by two major factors. The first relates to the harm AI poses to reporters’ technical abilities to produce strong journalistic pieces. Reporting is an inherently social act; it
requires reaching out to sources, interviewing individuals, and evaluating information for its accuracy. Student journalism hinges on its unique positionality, wherein it must represent a diverse campus community. This demands a proximity to and investment in the lived experiences of its primary readership, which AI can never authentically recreate. There is also the issue of credibility. While AI can trawl the internet for reliable sources, these models cannot be held accountable for the information that they spit out. With no stand-in for a contract of integrity, AI is also incapable of maintaining the standard of accuracy required for journalistic reporting. BBC tested this by asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity AI to summarize 100 of their news articles; 51 per cent of the AI-generated summaries contained “significant issues of some form,” while 19 per cent of the answers stated “factual errors.” The process of re-writing and editing an article is another aspect of journalism that demands human discernment. Good editing requires the ability to understand the nuanced choices an author makes in writing about an event or story. The weight of choosing one word over another for example, or the intentional use of the passive voice over the active, requires a certain finesse that AI models have difficulty achieving. Furthermore, our rationale for implementing this policy concerns the ethical implication of AI use. The Daily’s Statement of Principles has long affirmed our mission as an anti-oppressive paper to interrogate how power and privilege operate within different social and political landscapes. The maintenance of AI models, however, reproduces the very injustice we openly condemn. OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya, Sama, pays workers approximately $1.32 to $2 USD per hour to train the model on sensitive content detection, despite the fact that the hourly wage in workers’ contracts was stated to be $12.50 USD. This is not to mention the impact AI has on an environmental level; operating the data centres that power AI models consumes excessive amounts of water and energy. According to a June report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, the “water footprint of the energy used by data centres in 2025, around 4.5 trillion liters, could fill 1.8 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.” Moreover, the water used to cool AI data centres is often withdrawn from regions already facing drought or groundwater depletion, including Arizona and Querétaro, Mexico. Even when AI is not being used to plagiarize or steal, it remains an ethical landmine. Fundamentally, journalism is a public service founded on trust. It is essential to shed light on stories which would have otherwise slipped under the radar. Good reporting is about seeing, listening, and paying attention to the world around us. It requires a human eye, and the use of artificial intelligence to draft, edit, and generate journalistic stories cannot and will never be able to replace the care and attention that goes into this practice. We implore our readers and writers to engage with the world in an informed and human fashion; to respect and love the labour that goes into writing and editing.
