As Pichai noted at I/O, 2 billion people are using six of Google’s core apps.

Google believes it can help them byintroducing AIto the mix.

But AI isn’t what journalists need.

And the search giant’s foray into newsrooms should concern readers, too.

Google didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article.

OpenAI’s flagship AI app is a word organizer, not a truth collector or imaginative story teller.

It also isn’t trained on up-to-the-minute data.

Their deficiencies were too numerous and their hallucinations too common to present a real threat, I thought.

Now I’m not so sure.

But this doesn’t seem to matter.

The tech giants have gone ahead and manufactured the tools, anyway.

The Oppenheimer analogy is hauntingly apt here.

The bomb detonated; it worked.

Genesis, as it’s currently understood, can’t generate news.

Journalism is sourcing, verifying, fact-checking, spending hours on phones, years in documents.

It can quickly piece together somethingresemblinga news article.

Isn’t this just creating and exacerbating the same problems we already have, as humans writing stories?

We aren’t and can’t be.

And there are already pages and pages of aggregation on the internet.

Entire websites are built on it.

Every small detail, aggregated for content.

It results in a homogenous slop of similar-sounding stories flooding the web, TV and social media.

This slop is, at least partly, why the very idea of journalism has been blurred.

We equate the slop with the substance because we see so much of the slop.

Add a generative AI to the mix and we could ramp up the slop.

More worryingly, we introduce risk.

Readers deserve both and want both.

AI might provide the former, but what about the latter?

There’s no stopping the rise of AI in newsrooms.

you’re able to read our full AI policyright here.

The sort of experience we had has been seen elsewhere, too.

AtGizmodo’s io9a few weeks back, AI generated an error-ridden story about Star Wars films and TV shows.

These experiences serve as warnings about the rush to develop AI as a provider of news.

It isn’t too late.

It shouldn’t be given the capability to do so.

They provided context, by speaking with experts, about the potential promise and pitfalls of such a tool.

Eventually, they wrote something down.

Human beings broke the Genesis story.