Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg uses AI to write articles, got profiled by the WSJ, and the journalism internet lost its collective mind. Now the Reuters Institute interviews him. Working with AI has “pushed me into more original reporting, because all algorithms and all AI products are necessarily backward-looking.”
- Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg started his AI journey skeptical of hallucinations, then came around once ChatGPT added clickable sourcing, and has since used it for transcripts, outlines, press release synthesis, and research aggregation while claiming to be the final human check on every published word.
- His boss told the WSJ that stories are "at least 50% him," layoffs happened three weeks after he joined the AI pilot, and he declined to draw any connection between the two.
- Audience research from the Reuters Institute finds people are more accepting of AI for back-end tasks than front-end writing, which is exactly what Lichtenberg is doing, and more frequent AI users report spending more time on low-level tasks, not less.
