If you care about AI dangers, you should about public media

But now that 70% of Gen Z uses AI, high school graduates must fight to prove to college admissions officers that those 650 words are truly their own. Ingenuity becomes something that is not assumed, but must be proven.

As a student journalist, I’m deeply worried about AI. While my sister detests its use (a characteristic I’ve likely instilled in her), I know that not all students, even those my age, feel similarly. It’s hard to describe the disheartenment of graduating with a degree plagued by the rise of artificial intelligence, especially one where idea generation and writing — two of generative AI’s biggest skills — are at the forefront of what I do on a daily basis.

But also from a journalist’s standpoint, no matter how much AI’s increasing popularity affects me, the consistent defunding of public media hurts me even more.

I see it as this: AI is a new, developing tool that, while incredibly harmful to many career fields, has the possibility to be harnessed effectively and powerfully if limited and controlled in its usage. The defunding of public media, however, is a calculated decision to dismantle an institutional, educational and cultural tool that’s connected millions of people for decades. Its attackers deliberately aim to widen the knowledge gap between the elite and the underserved groups who more commonly rely on public media for information — media that’s been proven to produce more substantial and diverse content than commercial media.

Public media is what taught us to hate AI. Our desire for sincerity comes from the very same people who taught us every lesson we’ve known and practiced since learning how to speak: Be kind to others, stay curious, empathy matters, teamwork gets the job done, sharing is caring, imagination solves problems, and every other aphorism that makes us human — especially the aphorism “Just be yourself.”

How is it that we can unite across the political aisle to condemn AI, but funding the institution that taught us the importance of being genuine is considered a partisan issue?