The critical thinking test in journalism

What Gillian Tett wrote this week in the Financial Times was not a passing remark about the gap between rhetoric and reality in the use of artificial intelligence in the financial sector. It was closer to an early warning bell about a new generation entering the workforce armed with every technological tool imaginable, yet lacking the one thing knowledge-based professions cannot survive without: depth.
Tett, author of Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life, recounts a simple but revealing story. A senior financier in New York welcomed the 2025 cohort of summer interns, describing them as “the first true AI-native generation”—young people raised entirely in a digital environment, accustomed from an early age to asking algorithms to think on their behalf.
But when the firm probed deeper into the ideas of these ambitious young interns, it discovered something alarming: a stunning superficiality.
“They looked impressive at first,” the financier said, “but when we dug into their thinking, we found it disturbingly shallow.”
The company’s response was striking. It decided to reduce its reliance on STEM graduates and increase its recruitment of humanities students.
The reason? As the financier put it: “We want critical thinking, not just artificial intelligence.”
This small anecdote captures a crisis far larger than it appears. It is the crisis of an entire generation convinced that possessing tools is a substitute for possessing a mind-;- that speed compensates for understanding-;- that the ability to produce text is the same as the ability to produce meaning. AI can write, but it cannot think.
In recent years, the noise surrounding artificial intelligence has reached unprecedented levels. Companies promised knowledge revolutions. Enthusiasts predicted the collapse of traditional professions. Pessimists warned of existential catastrophe.
But as Tett notes, “Neither the huge profits nor the disasters have materialized—at least not yet.”
The reason is simple: AI excels at imitation, not inference. It gathers data, but it cannot see between the lines. It writes quickly, but it lacks a sense of irony, an understanding of context,´-or-the ability to read what is unsaid.
And here lies the great paradox: the more capable machines become at producing text, the more urgently we need humans capable of interpreting it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in journalism. If the financial sector has already discovered the dangers of superficiality, journalism today stands on the edge of an existential test.
Journalism is not the profession of “producing text.” It is the profession of analysis and inference—of connecting facts, reading signals on the ground, deconstructing narratives, and reconstructing meaning.
But what happens when a new generation enters the field believing that AI can think for them? A generation that writes at astonishing speed but fails to ask the right question? A generation equipped with dazzling tools but lacking the journalistic instinct no algorithm can replicate?
This is what Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian and current editor of Prospect, warned about when he said:
“Journalism is not what the machine tells you—it is what the human decides to ask.”
And as Thomas Friedman wrote, “The world has become faster than our ability to understand it.” The real challenge is not collecting information, but possessing the moral and intellectual compass to know what to do with it.
There is a widening gap between rhetoric and reality. The hype around AI in the media mirrors the hype Tett described in finance: grand promises,-limit-ed results, and a growing disconnect between what is said and what is actually happening.
Yes, AI can summarize thousands of pages, write quick articles, analyse massive datasets, and produce linguistically convincing text. But it cannot read political contradictions, understand social context, detect tone, perceive danger,´-or-grasp what is left unsaid. These are precisely the skills of a real journalist.
Speed is no longer an advantage—everyone has it now. The true advantage lies in deep analysis, inference, asking the right questions, reading signals on the ground, and understanding people before understanding data. As David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote: “Good journalism is not a race against time—it is a race against superficiality.” And he touches here a wound deeper than “new tools”´-or-“disruptive technology”: governments that want to crush independent journalism.
Today, journalism lives in an unfair era. It is judged by market logic, even though its original -function- has always existed outside the narrow calculus of profit and loss. The capital that once carried journalism as a public good now wants to turn it into a measurable commodity: clicks, watch time, and advertiser appeal. Big tech companies do not see journalism as a fourth estate, but as raw content to feed their platforms—content that can be replaced at any moment by a cheaper version: a language model, an automated editor,´-or-a “smart summarizer.”
In this sense, journalism is not merely facing an economic crisis. It is facing an attempt to strip it of its meaning and reduce it to a technical -function- embedded in a soulless digital production line.
Viewed through this lens—and with the dizzying acceleration of AI—we find ourselves facing two competing scenarios.
In the first, capital and tech companies succeed in crushing´-or-domesticating independent journalism, turning it into a software extension of major platforms, where texts are generated automatically, headlines are optimized for algorithms, and everything is measured by engagement rather than truth.
In the second, a professional and ethical resistance emerges—one that redefines journalism as a profession of meaning, not content-;- a profession of human intellect that interprets, questions, and resists ready-made narratives.
In the first scenario, we get a world flooded with information and starved of understanding.
In the second, AI becomes merely a tool in the hands of a journalist who knows that their true value lies not in writing quickly, but in asking bravely and reading deeply.
Between these two paths, the future of journalism will be decided in an age where AI seems to dominate everything—except what it can never possess: conscience, doubt, and human intuition.
This is the challenge facing the next generation of journalists. Will they become robotic editors producing soulless text?´-or-will they reclaim the essence of the profession and the discipline of critical thinking?
The human mind remains the last fortress of meaning. AI will continue to evolve, write, analyse, and propose. But one thing it will never produce is meaning.
Meaning requires a human mind that sees what the algorithm cannot see—one that doubts, compares, infers, and rearranges chaos into a coherent picture.

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