AI won’t replace you, but it will redefine work

In the newsroom, we used to say that good journalists had news judgment. That kind of experience-based, moral, human judgment will be the most valuable skill in the AI age.”

Frank Ahrens, a principal at BGR PR in Washington, D.C.

The former journalist in me looks at AI and thinks, “I've seen this movie before.”

In the early 2000s, I covered the implosion of the newspaper industry for The Washington Post. I wrote about the buyouts that sent seasoned journalists packing, the shrinking of newsrooms and the collapse of the business model that had sustained American journalism for more than a century.

Those of us lucky enough to retain our jobs had to learn and adapt. By the time I left The Post in 2010, the internet had permanently disrupted journalism and, for many, looked like the enemy.

I see that era as a tiny foretaste of what’s happening now. The upheaval driven by artificial intelligence will not be limited to a few unlucky sectors. The internet has taken away print journalism’s advertising revenue. AI is coming for nearly every job that doesn’t require a wrench or a shovel — and eventually, it may come for those, too.

For many, AI looks like the enemy. We will have to learn and adapt again.

White-collar professions that once seemed immune to automation are now squarely in AI’s crosshairs. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon stated that AI can write 95% of a 100-page S-1 prospectus in minutes, a process that typically takes multiple bankers several weeks to complete.

This revolution will force us to change not just what we do, but who we are. AI will stop feeling less like a tool and more like a coworker. That shift will demand a new kind of human employee: one who is broadly educated yet humble about what they do not know, nimble, endlessly curious, equipped with analytic skills and — perhaps most importantly — comfortable sharing their workspace with a thinking machine.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently put it this way: “You’re not going to lose your job to AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.”

And that’s the paradox: even as AI threatens to replace us, it also elevates the value of something uniquely human — our judgment.

AI can research and write basic facts faster than any human, but it still makes mistakes. It doesn’t understand context. It can’t (yet) distinguish between what's legally accurate and what's ethically correct.

AI chatbots require a prompt — directions for the tasks we ask of them. If you provide a poorly thought-out prompt, you will get a sub-optimal response from a chatbot. Think of it this way: If you tell a toddler, “Take this book over to that table,” you know you mean “directly.” But the toddler and AI do not. You must tell your toddler, “Take this book over to that table. Do not stop to pet the dog, chew on the book or hit your sister.”

A parent knows to provide those inputs to the child and then evaluate if she completed the task successfully. For now, that’s us with AI.

In the newsroom, we used to say that good journalists had news judgment. That kind of experience-based, moral, human judgment will be the most valuable skill in the AI age.

As Goldman Sachs’ Solomon said, “The last 5%” — what humans contribute — “now matters because the rest is now a commodity.”

The internet hollowed out old-style journalism, but it also gave rise to new forms of storytelling, new platforms, new voices and even new revenue models. It may no longer be a business for most, but it is still a career for many. I’d argue that journalism is even better now than 25 years ago, precisely thanks to the internet. In the end, it was not the enemy.

It’s too early to say if AI will end up being an enemy. But if we continue to adapt and grow, just as AI does, we still have the chance to make it an ally.

Frank Ahrens is a principal at BGR PR in Washington, D.C., and is a former Washington Post media industry reporter.