Let's be clear, The Newtown Bee does not use AI in our news reporting. At all, in any way.

A member of our editorial department was recently asked if we use AI for anything. They answered with a calm "no." Inside, their mental squirrel nearly spun its wheel off the spokes trying to contain what they really wanted to say. AI does not have residence within Bee Publishing Company. It is not welcome in any department within the historic building at 5 Church Hill Road where this hyper-local newspaper has been done by hand — and from the strong minds of those within — for just shy of 150 years.

Maybe the cheese stands alone on this. Another of our staff recalls a conversation with a colleague who works at an online business news site who spoke of the marvels of integrating AI into their work, using it to compile large amounts of research quickly to even writing short releases entirely using AI. Those generated stories are strictly vetted by the actual humans to weed out "hallucinations" — randomly generated misinformation that the AI model thinks is true — but they were still originally written using a Large Language Model. The staff member asked questions to learn as much as they could about this method of news generation, but left largely unconvinced. Benefits reportedly include data mining, or sifting through large collections of records; handling routine tasks such as transcriptions; or even generating headlines, summaries, and story outlines.

However, those are the building blocks of reporting. Men and women who want to write strong stories should know how to do those tasks. No one goes into this job without knowing some of the work will be tedious. You don’t learn from CliffsNotes prepped by someone (or something) else. You learn from data you mine yourself.

Each of our staff members is an expert on their normal beat at the paper. We know zoning regulations. We know the Town Charter. We know town ordinances, and the folks who work to generate them, administer them, and enforce them. We know the folks who work at our local institutions, and our local businesses. We know the issues facing Newtown. We don't need an AI model to tell us. Shortcuts can lead to long delays, and not taking the time to fully understand what is before us can lead to the long delay of making mistakes.

This doesn't even begin to address the fact that these AI models have been trained on information and material that are not owned by the companies that own the AI models, and the legality of that is still being contested. While we don't expect end users to be found liable if training AI on copyrighted materials does become illegal, it is still an ethical argument The Bee does not want to be on the wrong side of. Also, the data centers required to run AI have caused major environmental impacts through massive energy consumption, heavy water usage, and local air and noise pollution, according to the World Resources Institute. Driven by artificial intelligence expansion, large facilities consume millions of gallons of water daily and demand power loads rivaling small towns, straining local utility grids and increasing fossil fuel emissions.

One could possibly charge The Bee's staff with being Luddites, opposed to new technology just because it is new, but this newspaper was one of the first to have a regularly updated website (first in the state, in fact) — it's not the technology itself we're opposed to. And we will never rule out any change; the ability to be open minded and change one's mind given new information is key to learning. But for now, The Newtown Bee's material will continue to be home brewed and straight from the minds of its staff, not from an algorithm.