Journalism students are more skeptical of AI than their professors expect — and a classroom experiment at Northeastern University is surfacing exactly why that matters for how journalism schools teach the technology.

Dan Kennedy, who teaches a graduate ethics seminar at Northeastern, recently devoted a class to hands-on AI use, asking students to run interview transcripts through Claude and evaluate the results. What he didn’t anticipate: students pushed back harder than he did. “I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am — maybe more so,” Kennedy wrote in Poynter, noting that he himself regularly uses Claude for source research and brainstorming.

The exercise gave two teams the same transcript — an interview with Tracy Baim of the LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project — and asked them to generate bullet points, a 600-word summary, a news story, a headline, and a social media post. Students then evaluated each output for accuracy, utility, and ethical disclosure requirements. The bullet points came back too long; the news story was serviceable but flat; the headline Claude auto-generated was judged weaker than the one students explicitly requested.

The discussion questions Kennedy designed cut to the core tensions in AI-assisted journalism: Is it accurate? Is it better than what a human would produce? Is it worth the time saved? And what does disclosure actually require?

One question that generated the most friction: a policy at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, where editor Chris Quinn has reporters submit notes to AI, which then drafts the story for human review before publication. Kennedy asked students whether that practice is ethical if disclosed. The answers, he wrote, were “thoughtful, nuanced” — which is another way of saying the students didn’t let him off easy.

The experiment points to something journalism educators are grappling with across the country: the gap between teaching students about AI and teaching them to use it critically. Kennedy’s approach — put the tool in students’ hands, make them evaluate outputs against specific ethical criteria, then discuss — is closer to the latter. It also surfaces a real tension: students entering the field now are skeptical of AI in ways that may conflict with newsroom practices they’ll encounter on day one.

What Kennedy’s class doesn’t yet account for, by his own admission, is the coming cohort of students who grew up with generative AI as a baseline assumption. How they’ll engage with these same questions — and whether their skepticism will look different — remains an open experiment.

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Someone paid $26,000 for the CU Independent’s old web domain. Now it’s churning out AI garbage while the real student journalists scramble to afford a legal challenge.

The University of Colorado Boulder’s student newspaper migrated from cuindependent.com to cuindependent.org in 2024. Staff had lost track of who owned the old domain, which dated back to the 2000s. When they stopped paying WordPress to host it, the site went dark.

Then it came back. In July, the domain resurfaced with the Independent’s name and logo, publishing articles like “How Many Albums Does Drake Have?” and “Professional Movers in North Carolina for a Smooth and Secure Move.”

“I looked at it, and obviously was shocked and horrified,” editor in chief Greta Kerkhoff told the Washington Post’s Daniel Wu.

The copycat’s About page claims it honors “what CU Independent stood for: strong voices, independent thought, and stories that matter.” It’s a brazen identity theft that 21-year-old Kerkhoff has spent her senior year fighting instead of just running a newspaper.

“It really feels so weirdly malicious,” she said.

This isn’t an isolated case. NewsGuard has identified more than 2,000 AI-generated news sites as of October, according to the Post. These content farms use generic newspaper names to appear legitimate. But taking over a real publication’s recently active domain is rare.

“This is like their dream,” NewsGuard senior editor Sofia Rubinson told the Post.

Kerkhoff reported the site to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s business fraud unit. They told her the state couldn’t investigate unless she proved the copycat was making money. The domain’s owners are hidden behind a proxy service.

Her only path forward is filing a complaint with ICANN, the nonprofit that manages internet addresses. That costs $1,500, forcing the university-unaffiliated paper to launch a fundraiser.

Attorney Alexandra Bass, representing the Independent, said impersonating news sites has become more common since generative AI went mainstream.

“Generative AI can allow bad actors to produce content at a rapid pace — potentially flooding the web with misinformation, and at times directly regurgitating the works of dedicated journalists,” Bass told the Post.

Student Press Law Center attorney Jonathan Gaston-Falk said this could become standard for student and local newsrooms that can’t match big publishers’ legal resources.

“It’s frustrating because I think that a lot of these acts … are premised on the idea that student journalism somehow isn’t protected in the same way as professional media happens to be,” he said.

The copycat site has since changed its logo and removed links to the real Independent’s social media but it has kept the name and continues publishing.

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