2,400 years ago, Socrates recounted a story of a king and a god debating the value of a particular invention. It seemed to make people wiser and improve their memories, but could potentially “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who [learned] to use it.” This invention was writing.

Today, we still have an inherent fear of surrendering our learning to other entities.

Still, even as many newsrooms lament the age of AI and its possible role in journalism’s destruction, many have also begun to implement it in their reporting. The Associated Press, for example, uses OpenAI for headline suggestions, article summaries, and even automated writing for select cases. Most recently, The Sacramento Bee announced that they laid off writers and would use AI agents in their place.

Without a clear school-mandated guideline or precedent to follow, The Measure’s Editorial Board has been wrestling with what role AI should play in our journalism. These debates rarely ended in agreement, but we believe they are crucial nonetheless. We urge you, too, to think deliberately about what each use of AI helps you accomplish and what it may prevent you from learning. Our website offers one example of those tradeoffs.

The Measure serves a number of purposes in the community, but two main goals guide our work above all: learning to write and highlighting student voices.

As high school student journalists, we acknowledge that, relative to professional newspapers, our experience is limited. Still, we continue to publish to teach the skill of journalism. By occasionally printing cut-off headlines or failing to catch megablunders, we learn the process of producing a real paper for a real audience—you, the faculty, staff, alumni, and student body.

We also publish because we believe Milton benefits from its student newspapers. The Measure gives students a space to record events, publish opinions, and question decisions otherwise outside their control. We aim to spread these student ideas as far and as wide as possible.

After choosing to “vibecode” our website, having delighted in the efficiency and effectiveness with which Codex brought our site ideas to reality (AI was used for only the formatting and uploading of human-written articles), we disclosed this decision on our site…and then began to wonder if having AI assist in the design of the website contradicted our own mission. The Measure has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for AI for our writers so as to ensure they learn writing skills, and that the Measure amplifies genuine student voice and convictions.

When we were choosing to produce a website, we now see that we stood at a crossroads. On one hand, we could choose to prioritize the learning that comes from building a site from the ground up ourselves. That approach would have involved many bugs, failed attempts, and possibly no finished product to share with the community. Instead, we chose to sacrifice some of that crucial problem-solving experience in favor of creating a functional website quickly and effectively. We chose a product capable of sharing students’ learnings through their genuine writing over the opportunity to learn to code the site itself.

Literature of Technology and Disruption, an English course at Milton, grapples with questions around how technology affects our values and thinking, centered around American author and educator Neil Postman’s notion that “a new technology does not add or subtract anything. It changes everything.”

Postman writes that while tech is inherently neither a blessing nor a curse, it does carry both benefits and costs. Every use of AI involves a choice about what we gain and what we give up, if we wish to practice and learn, or create and do. Though we stand by our decision to build The Measure’s website with AI, we wish we had understood more clearly at the outset what sorts of sacrifices we were making and what sorts of accomplishments we were achieving. Whether you are undertaking a personal project or working on a school assignment (with the latter happening under the AI guidelines of your teacher, of course), we encourage you to approach each AI-related choice with intention. What skills must you practice and internalize yourself, and what skills are you willing to outsource?