IF YOU want to upset a group of journalists, tell them that AI can do their job more cheaply than they can, and as well — and even that it can do parts of it better. We are not software developers who can no longer argue that point since AI has already eaten their trade; we still believe that our special human skills are indispensable. But what, exactly, is it that we do better than the machines?

The question is raised very sharply by a letter to his readers from Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the US, explaining that he has redefined the jobs of his local reporters to exclude actual writing: “Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100 per cent reporting. [We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts.] We fact-check everything. Editors review it. Reporters get the final say. Humans — not AI — control every step.”

Mr Quinn is not some bumptious twit fresh out of an MBA programme, but a veteran journalist who started work long before the present crisis of the industry, and knows from personal experience what we lost when all the money gurgled off to Google: “As advertising waned and revenue diminished, we ended up with far fewer reporters than during the heydays. To sustain a newsroom at its current size, though, we need to publish a lot of content. Reporters today produce far more stories than during my time, and they also write the headlines, take their own pictures and handle all sorts of other tedious tasks.

“By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.”

What fascinates me about this argument — and Mr Quinn has made it explicit elsewhere — is that he wants to use new technology to resurrect forgotten jobs that the market extinguished. Thirty or forty years ago, it was a lucky reporter whose words made it through to the page as written. The sentences that we typed (or faxed, or phoned in) were simply raw material to be ground up and stuffed into the sausages that the subs and the back bench made. Quotes had to fit into a template, and so on.

I hated this, as anyone with a feeling for language must, especially when they are young and vain.

But what replaced it wasn’t better adapted to the production of good journalism. Dealing with people, digging out stories, and arranging the proper words in their proper order are all distinct and very different skills. Very few journalists combine them all when only one or two of them are necessary for professional success. If the business is left in the hands of the accountants. they will recognise only a talent for schmoozing upwards. and you end up with Will Lewis running The Washington Post into the ground.

I dropped the Quinn letter into a WhatsApp group of mostly middle-aged journalists, and it worked like a de-scaler tablet in a clogged kettle: fountains of froth and fury to start with and then a certain clarity emerging. It appears that the BBC is already using an AI-trained in-houser to rewrite and revise the raw stories sent in by the volunteers who have replaced some of the local journalists that it can no longer afford. The results must be checked for accuracy by a “senior BBC journalist” before being used, which makes this seem a very similar process to the one in Cleveland.

There are, of course, plenty of examples in which AI makes for much worse journalism, and where humans are doing jobs that could well be automated, while machines attempt the jobs that need a human touch. The Mail Online and all the Reach papers already consist almost entirely of rubbish that might as well be machine-generated even when it isn’t. Perhaps what “AI” has really changed in this business, as in all others, is not so much what computers can do as how easily we can tell them to do it. It is a pity that the difficulty of ensuring that they’ve done what we meant rather than what we said is now so great that it may be impossible.