Dear readers, it brings me joy that you have spent time reading articles from The Spectator. I have a love for this newspaper because it is a local source for information that is carefully assembled and delivered to you by fellow students. Briefly put, I am a fan of The Spectator and I hope you are or will be, too. I have a feeling that if you are reading this, you are someone who has a similar love or respect for the newspaper. We live in a strange time for journalism, where the truth, and the path to finding it, can be muddied by the very same technology that we rely on to obtain knowledge about simple things, like the weather or directions to the best local pumpkin spice latte. With everything that is changing about how we receive our information, I think that our student newspaper, and student journalism as a whole, is a crucial medium that puts relevant and credible information right where you, the reader, can see it.
Forgive me for the tangent that you’re probably used to hearing by now. You’ve probably noticed that AI is becoming more commonplace in day-to-day life, despite it still having flaws that might raise concerns for its credibility, like many large language models’ tendency to struggle with the non-existence of the seahorse emoji. I bring up this example because it is a perfect demonstration of what the difference is between a student publication like ours, and what corporations like Google and OpenAI want you to be satisfied with. AI, as we commonly understand it today, references information from across the history of humankind. However, a large source of information from humankind comes from scraping the web, condensing down complexities of human speech and communication into probabilities and patterns, so that any given AI model can fill in the lines of the script that you start whenever you submit a prompt. These corporations will tweak these models so that they can appear to understand the information they present, but it is important to know that this is simply an appearance, not the reality. These corporations are focused on developing trustworthiness because it is not necessarily the accuracy of the information that an AI generates that makes a model profitable, but the level of trust it can achieve with users.
Our publication differs from these corporations in ways that should matter to you. We take good care to find and talk directly to sources for our articles. As students, we care about what you want to see reported and we care that your voice is represented in our newspaper, but we won’t compromise the integrity of this newspaper for any entity. While OpenAI tunes its model to be a little less sycophantic, we’re working independently to gather relevant and credibly sourced stories from our area. This newspaper is here to serve you, and The Spectator’s dedication to this mission is what separates us from profit-driven algorithms and artificially intelligent sources.
So why should you care about student journalism? With larger-scale publications, there exist barriers that limit the freedom or independence of what these organizations are able to publish. These organizations may feel pressure to remain overly neutral or overly partisan over some issues, or feel pressure to report on certain topics while ignoring others due to the influence of those who fund these publications. Our publication is a fairly small operation, which provides us with the ability to answer to fewer people, thus making us functionally freer in our operations than other larger publications. We are living in a time where people are making blatant attempts to control the larger narratives that influence public thought, with journalism as a whole sitting in the middle of this struggle for power. Our organization provides an opportunity for students to become involved in the preservation of independent journalism, thereby empowering underrepresented perspectives in our local community.
Perhaps the best thing about The Spectator is how easy it is to get involved. Anyone curious or considering contributing to the newspaper is welcome to attend any Monday night meeting at 7:00 p.m. in the Campion basement. As someone who volunteered with no prior experience, I learned about how I can contribute to a cause I care deeply about. Please send our lovely Editor-in-Chief, Leila Bunker, an email at [email protected] if you have any questions about getting involved, and I hope to see you soon!
