According to senior lecturer Esther Hammelburg, “AI or not” has become a label used to openly discredit people, even though she argues it is not a suitable criterion for judging a piece of writing. She compares the debate to the early reception of photography, which was initially dismissed as art before developing into its own art form. Rather than getting stuck in debates about AI use, Hammelburg argues newsrooms should sharpen their own vision of what makes a good opinion piece, possibly combined with transparency about how AI was used.

Author and lecturer Merel Kamp, who previously wrote a widely shared opinion piece in NRC about AI use among students, emphasises the human and physical dimension of writing. For her, the value of a text lies in the lived, personal perspective that a language model cannot provide. In the classroom, she notices students turning to a chatbot more quickly for creative assignments, and regrets that outsourcing creativity removes something valuable from the writing process itself.

Senior lecturer Pascal Wiggers is outspoken in his criticism of newsrooms adopting AI-detection software, a topic he previously wrote about in Trouw. He argues that detection systems share the same limitations as the chatbots they are meant to catch: they are good at recognising averages but fail on exceptions, including people who are already unfairly labelled as writing in an “AI-like” style. Wiggers instead calls for an open conversation about when AI use is desirable, rather than tackling AI use with even more AI-driven surveillance.