Teaching AI in sports journalism
Some thoughts on the alleged inevitability of new technology
A reader question from
on my post from September about AI in Sports Journalism:Hello Brian, I teach Sports Production at the college level and have steered away from AI for awhile. It now seems like I need to prepare my students for this impending....doom? I will always teach good storytelling along with editing and field production but it seems that I will be doing my students a disservice if I don't teach and implement AI. Your thoughts?
This is a truly excellent question, and it’s one that all of us at all levels of education are dealing with.
I don’t have a great great answer to this, but I have some thoughts. I’d love to hear yours in the comments, too:
First thought: I don’t think that teaching good storytelling, editing, and field production — and, to add to that, writing — is necessarily at odds with teaching and learning AI. I think AI is a tool that students, teachers, and professionals can use, and I don’t think it’s an either-or situation.
Second thought: I do think a slight change in mindset can help AI feel a little less scary. Instead of viewing it as this existential threat to academic integrity or to dooming the future good writing and journalism, we can view it as a new tool. Play around with Chat GPT or other generative AI tools, see what you like and what you don’t. There are things it can do well, there are things it can’t do. But once we de-Boogeyman-ify it and look at it as another tool, it feels less scary.
Third thought: I am, admittedly, skeptical of the “inevitability of AI” conversation. You know the one. “AI is coming, we NEED to be prepared and ready for it.” Part of that is reading a lot of
. Part of that is the fact that people saying this always seem to be selling AI-related products and my Gen-Xer aversion to being openly sold a thing is very strong. Part of it is being in this space for a few years, so I’ve seen the “inevitability” of Second World, The Meta-Verse, Pivoting to Video, etc.In the past few weeks, as Twitter users have moved over to Bluesky, you’ve seen some retrospective pieces that look at how Twitter changed journalism. And that’s right but also not exactly right, because Twitter was just a platform. It was just a website. It was journalists who changed journalism by how they used Twitter. There was nothing inevitable about the change, and the change didn’t just happen. It happened because of the decisions journalists and editors made in how they used the platform.
Which is to say, maybe AI does disrupt1 education and journalism. But that change is not inevitable. We as teachers and practitioners have say in how that change happens.
Fourth thought: I do think there is a real opportunity for journalists here. I’ll leave you with the words of my favorite person in the world, who talked about this on The Other 51 earlier this year:
We as a society are going to be dealing withe fallout of tech bros’ obsession with this word for generations.