“Tell Us About Your Summer Plans and Enter to Win an Amazon Gift Card!” taunts the email in my inbox that I finally willed myself to open Friday morning. 

I treat any mail from the USC Career Center with healthy caution, for fear of unearthing mounting anxiety about my future. As much as I’d love a shot at scoring some Amazon chump change, I have no summer internship to report to Trojan higher-ups.

I felt singular in this experience before I bared my uncertainty in my February article about the purgatory between passion and career. The stream of reaffirming direct messages from my fellow Trojans made me realize my fraught position isn’t so unique. Lots of USC students feel deep wariness about the state of work life post-graduation. 

The demographic split of these DMs wasn’t equal, though. The piece seemed to resonate most with my peers in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This comes as no surprise, considering every journalism lecture during my now-six-month stint at USC seems to have devolved into a meditation on the pending future of multimedia in the era of generative artificial intelligence. 

Candidly, AI’s looming presence has stirred some apprehension about my choice to pursue journalism, but I’m resistant to handing my work over to ChatGPT so quickly. 

The downtrodden actor, the chippy anchorwoman and the steadfast teacher are cemented in importance by virtue of their humanity. A faulty line delivery, on-air flub or afflicted lecture are replicable in form, but not in essence. I have faith that human enclaves will necessitate themselves, permitting that enough young professionals roll the dice against the AI monster and follow their call to the creative. 

The situation is admittedly complicated, though. While I’ve been doing everything in my power to avoid reckoning with reality, deliberation on AI’s evolving role in our professional life makes sense, substantiated by a body of research that lists journalism and related careers among the most vulnerable to the AI industry shakedown.

In Microsoft’s AI susceptibility evaluation, broadcast announcers and radio DJs came in at No. 10, journalists at No. 16, and proofreaders and editors at No. 19 and No. 21, respectively. 

My journalism colleagues and I seem to have adopted our department’s unease about the AI phenomenon, but it isn’t an Annenberg-specific plight. Models, political scientists and teachers alike have to contend with the likelihood of losing out in the LinkedIn war to a robot. Even creative careers, like film and acting, some of USC’s pillar subject areas, aren’t guaranteed immunity. 

This heightens the classic capitalist crossroads of passion versus security, though this iteration comes with a twist: Stay the course and try to go toe-to-toe with AI, or swerve robot roadblocks, at least for now.

On my most anxious days, I have a mind to abandon the whole journalism ordeal and play it safe. The LSAT can’t be that hard, right? 

Put me on a soap box if you must, but, despite my best efforts, I just can’t seem to shake the death grip my dreams have on me. So, I guess I’ll pick the former. 

Even if I were to opt for something “safer,” I could never absolve myself from the AI juggernaut entirely. The American Arbitration Association now offers sponsored generative writing tools to help churn out briefs and claims, making a share of many lawyers’ work obsolete. 

This two-way consideration takes on a slightly new form at USC, with unrivaled access to pre-professional resources, spanning state-of-the-art media production complexes to script-writing databases. Trojans reserve a unique opportunity to pioneer the new world of non-traditional careers alongside AI, carving out creative spaces that even the most advanced generative models can’t penetrate.

It’s been said so many times that it’s approaching platitude, but it’s worth a reminder: AI can synthesize and mimic human voice remarkably well, but can never produce something affected by the human experience. While this makes sense on its face, how it’s applied practically remains in the bounds, so pessimism is understandable. 

Even a brief Instagram scroll poses a grim outlook for art. Our feeds are plagued by recycled AI pseudo-creativity that pales in comparison to the robust humanity of real innovation. 

Writing is the crux of my personal and academic identity. I wouldn’t be at USC, enjoying the privilege of penning Daily Trojan articles on a 75-degree early March afternoon if I hadn’t married myself to journalism. 

Cliche and reductive as it may be, wandering toward passion got me here, and, per dumb optimism or reliable instinct, I trust it to sustain me for the rest of college and beyond. People might argue that trying to out-write AI is futile, but I’m not going down without a fight, and neither should you.