I’m back and again with some thoughts on a conference – this time, the Sahafi Summit in Lahore a couple of weeks back. I realise it's become a bit of a theme and this is probably the last ‘conference’ oped, but the summit was fun, inspiring, surprising in parts and generally one of those rare events where you talk about journalism without wanting to bang your head against the nearest podium.
But before I get to the summit itself, let’s talk AI which also happened to be the main theme of this sahafi GT in Lahore. So, AI: the big new scary shiny thing that is apparently coming for our jobs, our minds and possibly our souls if you listen to the more dramatic commentary around it.
I will start with the most honest thing I can say: if anyone thinks AI isn’t already being used in journalism, they are either mistaken or they’re huge liars. There’s no third option here. Let’s face it – everyone uses ChatGPT. The bolder among us use Gemini. The more adventurous (or eccentric) use Claude. Someone somewhere is secretly using something called ‘Google AI Studio Beta Ultra Something’ – and pretending they’re not.
I, for one, am a self-confessed noob regarding most of these and I don’t know how half of them work (something I need to fix ASAP). But I do use ChatGPT – not to write my stories, but to get it to do what a very efficient personal secretary might: help me clean up work lists, or arrange my course outline according to dates, or rearrange bullets or data etc. To me, it is a very good support tool. Nothing more (for now). But the point remains: AI is being used. It’s here, it’s everywhere. And we might as well stop pretending otherwise. And honestly, the real provocation here is that AI didn’t break journalism, it merely exposed the cracks that were already there: shrinking newsrooms, low wages, the cult of speed over care. In that sense, AI is the mirror and we’re not looking very pretty in it.
Now, to the second big fear: AI will kill jobs. Is that true? To some extent, yes. Transcribers and translators have already felt the impact. Machines do a fabulous job at both and they do it in milliseconds without asking for that pesky thing employers hate: a salary. But is this the first time technology has changed our work culture? Hardly. We had typists – and then we didn’t. We had compositors – and then we didn’t. We had radio stars – and then, as the song goes, “video killed the radio star”. (It didn’t really, by the way; radio reinvented itself: hello podcasts?)
So yes, jobs will change. Some will end. New ones will begin. The question isn’t whether technology changes us – it always does – but whether we are willing to adapt. Instead of panicking, what if we trained ourselves? What if newsrooms offered workshops? What if, instead of rage-against-the-machine rants, we learnt to harness the machine? Because the real danger is not that we lose jobs but that we are ‘deskilling’. Over-relying on AI means young journalists may skip the fundamentals: interviewing, verifying, writing, building sources. I truly worry about producing editors who’ve never edited and reporters who’ve never reported.
Which brings me to the third point: the real question is not whether AI is used but how it is used. Are you using it as a creative partner? A research aid? A translator? A summariser? Fine. Are you using it as a shortcut so you don’t have to think or report or understand? Absolutely not fine. Journalism cannot be automated because journalism is not typing. Journalism is judgement and context and the ability to distinguish fact from truth (yes, those are not the same thing). And in a world drowning in cheap, fast, low-quality content, perhaps the real value proposition of journalism becomes the opposite: slowness, depth, lived experience – all the stuff that can’t be mass-produced or ‘prompted’ in seconds.
And this is where the Sahafi Summit comes in – because these were precisely the things people were talking about. One of the strongest concerns came from the unions panel, which talked about job losses. And they’re right to worry. Technology always hits the most vulnerable first. But the answer, again, is not to freeze in fear but to reorganise, to negotiate better protections, to demand training.
Then there were the students – my favourite moments of the two days. May I just say kudos to the Mass Communication kids at Punjab University for being so attentive and such great hosts. They asked some piercing questions: what happens to art and poetry if AI can generate both? What happens to creativity? What happens to the writer’s voice? To me, these questions were hope, a sign that the young ‘uns are alright. They’re walking into the future not as passive consumers but as interrogators. [As I tell my journo class: question everything].
My summit panel was on the ‘human spirit of journalism’, which sounds grandiose but was actually a very grounded conversation. I tried to say what I truly believe: the human spirit will survive this. Editors will survive this. Why? Because you will always need a human head to make sense of human stories. You cannot write about a flood or a protest or a family tragedy or a political moment without understanding the people in it. In countries like Pakistan, where so much of our cultural and political history is built on oral storytelling and journalistic witness, human memory matters. If anything, the rise of AI should push us double down on the most human parts of our craft: empathy, curiosity, nuance, accountability, scepticism.
So here we are: at the beginning of a long, complicated, sometimes frightening, sometimes exciting conversation. AI is not going away. Nor is journalism. And this conversation will continue – in classrooms, in newsrooms, in conferences, and yes, in columns like this one. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we may just figure out how to make this strange new world work for us.
PS: Huge shoutout to Media Matters for Democracy (MMFD) and Punjab University for pulling together something so thoughtfully structured.
The writer heads the op-ed desk in this newspaper and teaches college and university students. She says stuff on X zburki and can be reached at: zburkigmail.com
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.