In an era when every newsroom whisper seems to circle back to the same existential questions-will artificial intelligence take our jobs, will it strip meaning from the craft we love, will it turn journalism into a conveyor belt of content rather than a vocation of truth-Professor Neil Thompson, Director of the FutureTech research project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Boston, US, offers a perspective that is at once bracing and reassuring.
It is a perspective that does not deny the disruptive force of the technology, nor does it surrender the human core of what makes journalism matter.
He speaks at length about India, the media, and the turbulent promise of AI. The contours of a future came into view where the work changes, competition intensifies, and yet trust, integrity, and the pursuit of veracity grow more valuable than ever.
Professor Thompson said, "I think journalism will get hit by AI, and like many other technologies, as we empower people, the people who are good and are going to do things are going to become more capable of doing things."
He paused, then added a caution that felt less like a warning, "That means you're going to have more competition for the kind of stuff journalists are doing," which is why, he insisted, the centre of the profession must pivot even more decisively toward what cannot be faked, outsourced, or generated.
"The real crucial part here is that idea of veracity; like, how do we know that something is trusted, and that's going to become even more important," because while AI will make certain tasks easier, it will also flood the zone with volume, velocity, and noise.
The antidote, he reminded, is reputation rooted in rigor. "Maybe the specific tasks that journalists do may get easier and there's bound to be more competition in that; but the idea of having a lot of integrity in your work, searching for truth in a really deep way, developing a reputation for that. I think it is still going to be very valuable," he said.
Professor Thompson says "as more and more people can easily write articles of dubious quality, the value of that type of journalism will fall. But in such a world, there will still be a premium for true, trustworthy reporting. The trick for reporters over the coming years will be how to harness the positive productivity-improving aspects of AI while keeping the bedrock of trust intact."
Newsrooms will certainly be wrestling with their future, AI is surely coming for the copy-paste churn crowd, not the truth seekers; journalism isn't dying, it's being reborn, with AI as the midwife.
The expansive exclusive conversation then widened the lens to India's broader labour market, asking whether the world's most populous nation-ambitious, restless, and unequal-should brace for upheaval or prepare for uplift, and Professor Thompson did not sugar coat the trade-offs, offering a nuanced, almost surgical assessment.
"We are definitely going to get some impact on jobs here in India and the rest of the world; some of those are going to be very precious tasks and very precious jobs, and it's going to be painful for some people," Professor Thompson said.
Yet, in the same breath, he insisted on recognising the quiet relief that automation can bring, the kind that frees human beings from the tasks that degrade rather than dignify. "We're also going to see some things that will get automated and we say we're pretty happy to let that go; it's very nice to have some things that you don't enjoy doing get automated."
The productivity story, long the stubborn logic of technological progress, still applies, he argued, "We know that AI is going to make the pie bigger as we become more productive, and this offers the possibility of more jobs coming in," although, with characteristic restraint, he refused to pretend certainty about the far horizon. "In the longer run, of course, as these systems become more capable, it becomes a bigger question mark; I think we don't know quite the answer to exactly how jobs may be affected in the long run yet."
If this is yet another turn of the wheel, steam engines, electrification, computers, the internet, are we simply living through a familiar cycle of fear and adaptation, NDTV asked, and Professor Thompson responded in a way that acknowledged the rhythm of history while isolating what feels different now, "I think people are right to say, as these capabilities develop, there actually is going to be some risk to jobs; I think that is true."
The professor then drew a line under the variable that matters most in human terms, "The question is-we lost our job and we start to retrain, and by the time we get to the next job, AI is doing that as well; that's the real question here," because if the pace of change outstrips the pace of retraining, then the gap becomes not merely economic but social. Still, he offered a kind of grounded reassurance that resists both panic and hype, "We think actually that many of the tasks that humans do are going to stick around for a very long time; so that sort of gives me some comfort."
The practicalities matter too: which systems does he personally rely on, given the abundance of models and the fervour around their capabilities, and in that spirit, his answer was both candid and pragmatic. "I sort of split my time between using GPT-5 and using Claude," he said with a researcher's nonchalance, "Right now I'm probably enjoying GPT-5 more... but maybe the next one comes out, I'll switch back to Claude."
When the conversation turned to the Chinese AI model DeepSeek and the broader question of Chinese AI development, the tone shifted from curiosity to caution without tipping into alarm.
"I am not as scared as most people are about the Chinese AI model DeepSeek; they've done impressive things, but other people are doing impressive things as well, and I think we still have a very vibrant competition."
Later, true to his habit of cantering consequences rather than labels, he added, "It's less about whether the model is Chinese or not, but how people are going to use it afterwards; these systems are so powerful that if people misuse them, it's going to be a real problem."
Use versus misuse, promise versus peril-this is the axis on which every conversation about AI eventually turns, and Professor Thompson, unwilling to romanticise or catastrophise, laid out the ledger with clinical clarity, "When we look at previous technologies, the benefits that we get-and, you know, for AI, they're going to be a lot," he said.
He added, "We automate some tasks that we don't want to do; we make scientific discoveries; we do some data science at a level that we haven't been able to do before," before acknowledging the low-probability, high-impact scenarios that keep ethicists, policymakers, and technologists awake at night.
"There is this long tail of unlikely things that could be very, very bad, where maybe there's a conflict between two groups of people, and one of those people says, 'I'm going to take the safety switches off'; then we could go down really bad roads," the professor said.
For India, there is a further, uniquely textured challenge: language, the living fabric of culture and inclusion, because an AI that does not hear you cannot serve you, and here Professor Thompson was quietly insistent, "Sadly, we see that the number of models that cover many of India's multitude of languages is not nearly as great as English or even Chinese."
He advocates for the unglamorous but foundational work of building digital corpora and training systems that understand and respect linguistic diversity. "If you want to have the widespread benefits to lots of people in India, it is going to be important to develop those corpuses of digital language and to train models that are really good in those things."
In the end, as NDTV weighed the hopes and hazards, we asked whether he considers himself an evangelist or a sceptic, and his answer, delivered with a wry smile that suggested long years of balancing excitement with evidence, refused the false choice, "I often think that I play an interesting middle ground. If you talk with the people who are most excited about AI, I think they think I'm a little gloomy... but I talk to some economists who say things are going to stay very much the same, and to them, I'm the real techno-optimist; I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle."
Journalism will be affected! Journalists will be tested, he insists; but journalism will survive, he believes. The craft will change as AI moves into the newsroom, the workflows, and the audience's expectations, yet the soul of the profession-truth pursued with integrity and patience-will only grow more precious as machines become prolific producers of words without context, claims without verification, and narratives without accountability.
In that future, as Professor Thompson reminds us, those who do the hard work of veracity will certainly not go obsolete but they may become more essential, because AI may be the midwife of journalism's next chapter, but it cannot be its editor-in-chief.
