How I’m Trying to Use Generative AI as a Journalism Engineer — Ethically

Originally published on themarkup.org

Image of an iceberg where the majority of the iceberg is underwater. The image of a search engine with the letters "GPT" is overlayed at the top.

Credit: Olga Aleksandrova

This article was originally published on The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society. Read the original article on their website.

By: Tomas Apodaca


Hello, readers!

I’m Tomas Apodaca, a journalism engineer at The Markup and CalMatters. It’s my job to write software and analyze data and algorithms in service of our investigative journalism.

In the year since I joined The Markup, I’ve been thinking about how artificial intelligence can be used in the newsroom—or really, whether generative AI in particular can be ethically used in the newsroom at all. The journalism industry’s relationship with AI is complicated. News organizations like the Associated Press have licensed their content to OpenAI, while newsrooms like the New York Times are suing OpenAI. Just last week, California lawmakers scrapped a proposal that would’ve forced Google to pay news organizations for using their journalism, in favor of a deal that includes some funding for journalism, and specifically, funding for a “National AI Accelerator.”

I’m an AI skeptic, in part because I learned about generative AI in 2021 from a paper that questioned whether the benefits of ever-larger language models were worth their costs. Since then, I’ve learned so much more about the ethical and environmental toll that AI takes:

… and that’s just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

Unfortunately for me (and for the world), I’m convinced that generative AI can also be extremely useful.


This year I have been working out how I can use AI in a way that gets around some of these issues, with limited success. The credo I’ve settled on is “Run locally and verify.”

There are specialized models small enough to run on personal devices, and tools like LM Studio, Ollama, and llm make them easy to download, run, and tinker with. Now I can run experiments, extract text from PDFs, analyze large datasets, ask coding questions, and transcribe audio on my 3-year-old laptop’s processors. The local models aren’t as fast or capable as the hosted options, but they get the job done.

Critically, and in accordance with The Markup’s AI ethics policy, I check the results for accuracy and will always disclose when I’ve used AI in the production of a story.

It’s an approach that doesn’t address many of my concerns, but at least with this setup, I don’t have to worry about dumping water on the ground every time I hit “Enter.”

What about you? If you’re struggling with how to use AI or another technology ethically and have found effective workarounds, I’d love to hear about it.


I wish I could dismiss AI, like cryptocurrency or the metaverse: hyped-up technologies with limited practical applications (unless you’re extorting money or fancy wearing bulky headgear to talk to an avatar of your boss).

AI is overhyped, but even if the industry bubble pops tomorrow, the technology’s genuine utility means it’s not likely to disappear from our lives. That’s why, despite my misgivings, I needed to figure out how to use these tools in a way that minimized their harms, at least so that I could report on them responsibly.

Here are a few things that convinced me that AI (generative and beyond) has real-world utility:

I know that this technology is disruptive. I’m not happy with how it’s hurting workers and guzzling key environmental resources. I’m trying my best to mitigate the downsides. But if I’m being honest with myself, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing enough, and as an industry, we need to prioritize ethical considerations when we think about using generative AI.

How are you thinking about these issues? How is AI affecting your work? What are you doing in response? Tell me about it at tomas@themarkup.org.

Thanks for reading,

Tomas Apodaca
Journalism Engineer
The Markup / CalMatters

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.