Is AI going to take your job? It's coming for mine, apparently

My first night at The Canberra Times, all those years ago, was spent collating the local sports results. I thought I had made it as a journalist, a big responsibility on the paper of the nation's capital. It was crucial that our readers knew who had scored what at the "four ball best ball" at Yowani, or who took out the club pennant at the Canberra Bowling Club. I was a vital cog in the machine.

But now people are happy if a machine becomes that vital cog - in a few areas at least.

While the University of Canberra's 2024 Digital News Report revealed almost 60 per cent of its survey participants said AI-generated news made them "uncomfortable", it was somewhat disconcerting for this journalist - who is happy to admit she has no real interest in politics or international affairs - to read about the areas where people were "very/somewhat comfortable" with AI taking the lead.

Thirty-one per cent of respondents said they were "very/somewhat comfortable" with AI being used for sports coverage, 26 per cent for celebrity or entertainment news, and 26 per cent for arts and culture. These things have been at the core of a very enjoyable career.

We used to joke, 30 years ago, that there were certain colleagues in the sports department whose weekend match reports could be done to a template of sorts. Team A beat Team B, with player C scoring in the Nth minute. They never were, but is that the same kind of thing?

I used to love collating the actual sports detail, as we called it. It was a learning opportunity for a young cub reporter. For one, I had to master the new-fangled thing called a fax machine, amazing technology really. I could hardly believe that Ron O'Neill could be enjoying a schooner at the golf club kilometres away and be sending me information.

Or we'd man the phones. People would ring up after their game and let us know who won, who scored. More often than not we'd have a good chat and find another story.

Or, there were the really keen ones who used to drop out to the Fyshwick office and drop an envelope containing said results into a mailbox on the outside wall on Pirie St. I sometimes wonder, now that we've been in the city for a while, if that mailbox is full of a decade's worth of results.

Sports results were a great way of finding interesting stories too. Look, a hole in one. In my early years of covering cricket, I became quite adept at writing match reports from a scorebook sheet.

Not many people know I'm quite a keen cricket scorer. There were a couple of Comets games back in the day where I'd offer to do a bit of scoring to give the team's official scorer a break. There's so much to be gleaned from the intricacies of a scoresheet.

And lifestyle! You heathens. Do you not like to read interesting stories? Maybe people don't anymore. Particularly those younger generations (who are at least happier to pay for news.) A good lifestyle story tells you more than the who, what, where and when of something. Or it should at least. It tells you why you should see something, eat something, attend something, with the emotion that only another human, who you trust, can do.

I sometimes get criticised for putting too much "voice" into the things I write. But I'd like you to think that if something got me excited, it might get you excited too. Because, after all these years, it's kind of like we know each other, and maybe you kind of believe what I'm telling you.

If I'm honest, I'm probably like the majority of the survey respondents who admitted they didn't know "a lot" about AI.

Maybe it could do exactly what I've been doing all these years and do it better and quicker and wouldn't take sick days or need to rush off to get the kids from school.

I read my colleague Saffron Howden's piece on AI with great interest. She's driving how we deal with AI here at ACM. She says that AI should never replace local journalism but perhaps it could replace some mundane tasks so that journalists can spend more time in the community.

But, for me, some of those mundane tasks have been career highlights. Talking to some old bloke as he handed over a handwritten sheet of sports results.

Perhaps it is time I got replaced by a machine.