Editorial: C&EN is using AI—very carefully – American Chemical Society

“What are you all doing about artificial intelligence?” It’s a question C&EN staffers get a lot. Journalism as a profession was already reeling with the collapse of business models based on robust demand for print. And then along came a generative AI with tools that can crank out grammatical, plausible text on any subject on demand.

Generative AI’s capacity to change the practice of chemistry is an opportunity and a concern. This week’s cover story by C&EN reporter Alex Scott takes a wider look at the implications. In both journalism and research, a central debate is whether AI will enhance our professional output or make our jobs redundant.

As a start to answering that question—for ourselves and for our readers—C&EN published a statement about how we intend to approach AI , which you can view at cenm.ag/cenaiethics.

The AI craze was kicked off by services such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, which generate text and images in response to user prompts and based on huge datasets harvested from the open internet. Because those tools can make content that superficially resembles the text and images we create at C&EN, we needed to take a position about using them.

A central challenge in crafting our position was deciding what we mean by AI. If AI is a computer system that uses algorithms and language databases to suggest text, is spell-check AI? What about when word-processing programs offer grammar tweaks? What about when an AI helps us write code to analyze a set of data?

One definition of AI, from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, includes all those things. And if that’s the case, we already use AI.

When it comes to journalism, though, we believe that even at its best, AI can generate only a pale imitation of what we do. Our AI statement aims to tell you, the reader, that we will not be replacing the curated, deeply reported chemistry journalism you come to us for with an uncritical stream of synthetic thought.

That position is rooted in our best understanding of what you want. A recent audience survey conducted by C&EN BrandLab, part of our advertising department, shows that American Chemical Society members, by far the biggest group of C&EN readers, are skeptical of AI-generated content.

Our AI statement does accept that C&EN will find compelling uses for AI. Across nearly every industry, the expectation is that anyone who won’t harness AI in their work is going to spend their career competing against people who will. AI looks now like computers, the internet, and smart phones looked at their respective dawns. It will get better. And even though that prospect makes many of us at C&EN uncomfortable, we’re not willing to wager the future of our 102-year-old journalistic endeavor on a quixotic refusal to adapt to a new technology.

Instead, we intend to proceed carefully. You can be sure that we will need to revisit and reconsider our AI statement and practices regularly as the field matures.

And we will keep in mind our mission, which is to bring you news and analysis that is accurate, useful, and interesting. We will also do our best not to undermine the creative trades that empower journalism and enliven other parts of the human experience. We invite you to walk with us and hold us accountable as we work to position C&EN as an indispensable resource for understanding the future of chemistry.

This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this week’s editorial, the lead contributor is Craig Bettenhausen.

Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.