There are two ways to have a successful career in journalism. One is to be good at your work and lucky enough to find and keep a decent job. The other is to possess a brain as empty — and an ego as fragile — as a glass onion.

You may think there are other ways. That’s a common delusion. For example, Chris Quinn, a man with a very successful career in journalism, believes that a willingness to use artificial intelligence will separate the future losers of journalism from the future winners. In fact, Chris recently rejected one such loser from a job at his prestigious website cleveland dot com, where he serves as president and editor. He wrote (or did he?) a whole column about this.

Wait no, I have that backwards. It’s actually Chris and his website who were rejected. A prospective reporter told him thank you for the nice offer but I actually don’t want a “journalism job” where I give my notes to an “AI rewrite specialist” who does all the word stuff for me. The applicant didn’t understand the value of being “freed” from the burden of writing. Their loss.

Fortunately, Chris was magnanimous and totally not mad. He didn’t blame this early career journalist for having such a warped, unrealistic perception of their chosen field. So who did he blame? Who told this deluded young person that their job might require them to know how to form coherent sentences, how to organize and structure stories, how to identify and polish their ledes, how to find colorful and vivid details, and how to include only the best and most hard-hitting quotes? More generally, who is responsible for causing recent graduates to, in Chris’s words, “imagine themselves as long-form magazine storytellers, chasing a romanticized version of journalism that largely never existed”?

The answer of course is j-school. Chris laments that journalism professors are poisoning their students against AI and supposedly feeding them fantastical visions of a media paradise where every journalist is a staff writer for the New Yorker.

I went to j-school. So did Chris, incidentally. But whereas Chris graduated sometime in the last century, I went to school with people who had to look for their first journalism job in the 2020s. I can tell you with great confidence that recent graduates and young reporters may not know everything about their chosen profession — they are, after all, young — but they’re aware that their industry is stuck in a catastrophic death spiral of layoffs and budget cuts and that their most realistic options are to either accept a $30k-a-year position at a hedge fund–owned paper in central nowheresville population 300 where they will serve as reporter, editor, copyeditor, photographer, videographer, social media poster, and town punching bag for two years before burning out — or look for a PR job.

Chris is also aware of these dismal labor conditions. Which is why he took such offense when someone rejected “a foothold in a thriving newsroom” — referring to the job offer from cleveland dot com. He writes:

By walking away, they enter the worst journalism job market in years. The Washington Post is laying off 300 people. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is cutting 15 percent of its staff. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down in May. The Detroit News’ purchase by the Detroit Free Press likely guarantees significant layoffs there. Hundreds of veteran journalists will compete for few openings. Someone just out of school stands little chance.

To put a finer point on things: Chris is surprised that this young journalist wasn’t desperate enough to take a job where they’d be tossing fact nuggets into a slop machine. But I suspect this applicant — apart from wanting to write their own stories — also understood that the actual function of AI in journalism is to turbocharge the deskilling and outsourcing of the labor force. It’s no coincidence that Chris oversees a newsroom that was once a unionized newspaper with hundreds of reporters and editors and the site of the NewsGuild’s first ever local, but is now a desiccated husk with a shrunken, non-unionized staff.

For newsroom bosses of a certain type, AI is an orgasmic dream come true. The technology doesn’t have to be good — just good enough to mimic the output of human labor and fool a distracted, semi-engaged readership. Chatbots don’t talk back, aren’t precious about their writing, don’t need to be paid, and, most importantly, will never ever ever organize.

I’m not saying Chris Quinn of cleveland dot com is that kind of boss. He may not consciously want to replace his reporters with robots and may believe — sincerely — that the future of journalism would be brighter if j-schools trained their students to write prompts instead of nut grafs. If he does believe this, then he’s currently the biggest sucker working in media because the people who own his publication and cut his checks — the astronomically wealthy Newhouse family — are exactly that kind of boss. Because one day soon, they’re gonna find the perfect AI program to finally free him from the burden of his job as editor.