Opinion | If you care about the danger of AI, you should care about funding public media

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As I review my younger sister’s college application essay for grammar, syntax and the occasional synonym change, she tells me that it’s been flagged as 40% AI-written.

“Well, is it?” I ask her. With a defeated shrug, she says that while ChatGPT served as her part-time creative consultant for idea generation, the essay itself was written entirely in her own words. It most certainly wasn’t 40% AI.

Although her affinity for the em dash may suggest something else to the skeptical admissions officer, I know my sister — she would never share a private story about her life written by someone who hasn’t lived it, let alone written by a machine unable to live.

The concurrent rise of AI as a writing tool with my sister’s high school graduation presents a unique problem that I never had when applying to college: the struggle to prove authenticity.

Prior to accessible AI tools, college essays were predominantly assumed to be genuine. They tasked students to write about lived experiences unique to them; there was little room for fabrication when the student had to think and write for themselves.

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.”

If politicians truly cared about autonomy, expression and ingenuity as they claim, the defunding of PBS would be a much more mainstream issue. After all, if public media collapses, journalists are not the only ones dealing with the aftermath.

If children grow up using artificial intelligence, they will grow up learning technical, academic shortcuts. There is little we can do to fully prevent that.

But if children grow up with artificial intelligence concurrent with public media, they will grow up learning that there is no shortcut to empathy, compassion and truly being yourself.

So while my sister continues to complete her college applications with a disdain for artificial intelligence, I fear for the decades to come, when the ingenuity taught by public media won’t be there to make us care about the use of generative AI.