AI ‘journalists’ are pitching stories to editors, but the real problem isn’t the writing

“Did you see the job application from the clanker?????” was the Slack message from my editor in September, after an AI agent applied for a freelance-writer job we had advertised. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. It took me a second to process “clanker,” a derogatory slang term for a robot borrowed from science fiction stories such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The message prodded me to read the entire email I’d lightly skimmed earlier, and now I cou...