Because a significant chunk of what gets passed off as journalism on such sites is just writing copy -- for example, regurgitating press releases, or repackaging the work of another outlet that actually did do the legwork of investigative journalism. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to speed up the task of summarizing some other text for republishing, but I do question the value of such work in the first place.

It's going to be a long, long time until artificial intelligence can do the work of a true investigative journalist.

Because you have to have specific knowledge about how AI works to know this is a bad idea. If you don't have specific knowledge about it, it just sounds futuristic because AI is like a Star Trek thing.

This current AI craze is largely as big a deal as it is because so few people, including the people using it, have any idea what it is. A cousin of mine works for a guy who asked an AI about a problem and it cited an article about how to fix whatever the problem was, I forgot. He asks my cousin to implement the solution proposed in that article. My cousin searches for it and discovers article doesn't actually exist, so he says that. And after many rounds of back and forth, of the boss saying "this is the name of the article, this is who wrote it" and my cousin saying "that isn't a real thing and that author did write about some related topics but there's no actionable information there", the boss becomes convinced that this is a John Henry situation where my cousin is trying to make himself look more capable than the AI that he feels threatened by and the argument ends with a shrug and an "Okay, then if it's so important to you then we can do something else even though this totally would have worked."

There really needs to be large-scale education on what language models are actually doing to prevent people from using them for the wrong purposes.

Oh god, I read that article and thought "Well that's wrong, I wonder how they could mess that up." I saw the author was an AI and just laughed.

But they got the click in the end and I have an ad blocker so I have no idea who wins at that point.

It's a 1:1 replacement for the lowest effort trash written by an un- or under-paid intern, but when companies start assuming (and they will) it can take over well-researched reporting, it'll be crud for us all.