(Editor's Notes by Christina Myer - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

One of my favorite things is to have negative preconceived notions about an event or interaction and be proved spectacularly wrong. I was lucky enough to have that happen to me yet again this past week when I attended an event during which West Virginia University journalism students presented their work to provide insights and news industry advice on the use of artificial intelligence.

I expected this group of students to tell a room full of seasoned newspaper people that we were obsolete — that AI was coming for our jobs and we’d better just start clearing off our desks now. I was ready to pepper the students with questions.

What a relief to find out I was getting all worked up for nothing, and, in fact, learned a lot from their research.

The students put together a meticulous set of experiments, using a variety of AI platforms to determine everything from whether the apps were capable of making sense of legislation to whether they are capable of replicating/mimicking a human reporter’s writing style. They looked at whether AI produced any efficiencies that could become useful newsroom tools — and whether it could be trusted.

And then they were brutally honest in their assessments. I would expect nothing less of budding journalists, but truly, I hadn’t known AI is still such a mess. One platform had to be dropped from the experiment entirely after it repeatedly refused to do what the students were asking of it. (A bit frightening, really.)

A few points came shining through as they walked us through their research. Yes, there are minor tasks for which AI can be a useful tool. None of those tasks falls into what makes a person a good reporter as opposed to simply a stenographer.

For the most part there were major concerns with the stories produced by AI. Experiment after experiment concluded every app had a significant problem with accuracy. I got a chuckle out of the use of the word “hallucination” to describe what some platforms generated.

Nearly every student made clear their research showed anything generated by AI required fact-checking, addition of context and editing by a human — to the degree that one student told me she didn’t believe the use of AI was a time-saver for newsrooms because a human still has to do so much work to make the stories readable.

There were privacy and transparency concerns, warnings about the pitfalls of this platform or that, and a general consensus that, no, AI will not be coming for our newsroom jobs any time soon.

One day, there may be a use for AI as a tool here. If that happens, you will know it. We will be crystal clear about what we are using and how. But one student said the research they had done “shows the importance of having a journalist there.”

In fact, in warning that AI is just a tool, one of the final recommendations for newsrooms regarding AI was “Tech cannot replace journalists right now.”

I was so pleasantly surprised, I wasn’t sure how to react. What a joy it was to have students in their late teens or early 20s tell me they weren’t buying into the latest tech fad. (I remember when we all were told Google Glass was the next big thing in journalism and we’d better get ready for it to do things humans couldn’t. Academia was big on Google Glass.)

To be clear — and to the students’ credit — they talked about ways AI could improve that might make a more effective newsroom tool in the future. They weren’t just up there saying “Hey, AI, get off our lawn!”

But as the floor was opened for discussion, other students reinforced what we who are working in community newspapers already know. Particularly at the local level, there isn’t — and may never be — a replacement for having a human reporter who lives in the area and knows the people and issues about which they are reporting. AI has no stake in making sure it accurately gives readers the information they need AND explains to them how it will affect them.

We do. And we take that job very seriously. Someday soon, the students in that room will, too.

I’m very much looking forward to it.

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com