Journalist Adam Penenberg is looking for ways to bring ethics codes to life — or at least, artificial life.
Penenberg, who broke the Stephen Glass scandal as a reporter at Forbes, is the principal author of the NYU Ethics Handbook, a 35-page guide for journalism students modeled after newsroom ethics codes. Last year, as ChatGPT use among students exploded, faculty added an addendum on ethical uses of Generative AI tools.
Read the full NYU Ethics Handbook
Tools like ChatGPT allow students to draft an essay or summarize a reading in the span of seconds. But Penenberg, now an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and director of the American Journalism Online Program, sees another way that these new tools can assist in his classroom. “There’s a real alarm now with students coming into programs not being able to engage in critical thinking,” which is crucial for journalists, including when teasing out complex ethical questions, Penenberg says.
In response to these concerns, he built a personal chatbot for his journalism ethics class. Here’s how it works: Penenberg uploaded the class syllabus and his own writings and analysis and configured the bot to debate ethical case studies with the students. “I have it acting like a very aggressive debater who’s going to take down your argument,” Penenberg explains, “[so] you have to really know the issues and know how to laser focus on certain things.”
Penenberg describes how the bot pushes back on students’ sweeping claims, forcing them to think critically or interrogate their use of general terms like morality, newsworthiness, and privacy. When students argue, for example, that the subject of a story was a public figure, the bot might assert that he was retired. If the student posits that an act was immoral, the bot might counter, “What do you mean by immoral?” Rather than offering hard-and-fast rules, “it would help you arrive at the conclusion. It wouldn’t tell you” if a path is right or wrong, says Penenberg.
J-schools have a unique responsibility to affirmatively deploy AI in a way that enhances rather than dilutes the learning process, Penenberg says, introducing students to the rigorous decision-making processes occurring within newsrooms daily. “How do I know they’re learning?” Penenberg often asks himself after class. Tossing them a robot challenger might be the first step.
Read the NYU Ethics Handbook and other newsroom ethics codes and AI Guidelines at ethicsandjournalism.org/resources.