John Wihbey’s Class AI and Media Industry is designed to encourage students to work with AI to understand the uses and limitations of these tools in terms of journalism, social media and public relations.
In Northeastern University’s AI and Media Industry class, John Weavey wants students to not only use artificial intelligence, but think that way.
Wihbey, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern and director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab, says it is important for the next generation to understand the technologies that “transform (and influence), influence (and influence) news media, society, public relations, and strategic communication.”
“When you get past the initial adoration and the initial disappointment that they’re not perfect, you start to realize that these are unique tools, but they start to realize that they’re tools,” Wihbey says. “They can make your life easier and you can work more efficiently, but you have to be able to use them in a really clever and targeted way and know what they are good at and what they aren’t.”
Wihbey’s graduate level courses expose students to ChatGpt, Claude, Gemini and other AI models in a variety of ways. They spend hours on these tools in a “some sort of experiential education paradigm,” and “learning to think like that model, allowing them to understand their strengths, their weaknesses (and),” says Weebay.
While students take the time to learn and investigate potential use cases of AI in specific areas such as social media and journalism, Wihbey emphasizes the value of making those lessons work.
Part of the class is partnering with nonprofits through Northeastern’s Service Learning Program to find ways to integrate AI into their work. It may seem to help organizations map communication strategies and frame historical archives.
“There’s a kind of coercive feature where you have to do things that aren’t abstract, but you have to really think about how you can use these tools to make an impact in the real world in an organization that actually has needs,” Wihbey says. “It’s a great way to serve the community, but doing a rich intellectual movement and doing that intellectual movement might mean realizing that it’s not all about AI.”
In another part of the class, Wihbey appointed students to coordinate research narratives that could potentially use AI. The students didn’t go far enough to write these stories, but they pitched them to Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the New York Times and a well-known professor of practice in Northeastern.
Weebay and his students approached all of their work with “severe skepticism,” Weebay says. His class had to consider some of the questions still present around AI.
But Wihbey says these are questions worth asking. He hopes that students are more equipped to answer them.
“These are questions in every expert in the world and almost every walk in life. Where is that line?” Weebey says. “What we tried to do is put a lot of intellectual capital into a product that has been essentially shaped by a lot of human thinking, a lot of craft and a lot of care, a lot of research. But the model helps us in a critical way.
