I arrived in Bangkok on Oct 12 to cover the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It was my first time covering the event, and I came with a set of expectations.
I figured I would be reporting on the IMF's flagship World Economic Outlook, listening to banking and finance executives discuss interest rates and inflation, and following debates over the energy shock.
What I didn't expect was how the rise of artificial intelligence permeated most of the discussions throughout the weeklong event.
Some sessions were dedicated specifically to AI. One of the most popular was a panel on AI and the global economy featuring Jack Clark, co-founder of the United States technology company Anthropic. But AI also came up at sessions that had little, if anything, to do with the emerging technology.
AI had stirred mixed feelings among participants. There was optimism about the benefits it could bring, but also an underlying unease over how this new technology may in fact cost more than whatever economic gains it was expected to generate.
In its World Economic Outlook, released during the meetings, the IMF projected global growth of 3.1 percent in 2026 and 3.4 percent in 2027. But the gains are unevenly distributed, highlighting widening income disparities among economies around the world.
Economies integrated into the AI supply chain are better positioned to cushion external shocks. The outlook is bleaker for energy-importing economies that are not part of the AI value chain, which must contend with higher import bills, exchange rate pressures and tighter fiscal space. Unfortunately, many low-income and vulnerable countries belong to this latter group.
Such existential concerns over AI were evident during a jam-packed fireside chat between IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and United States Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh.
As Fed chair, Warsh was clearly someone many participants hoped would offer at least a hint about the direction of US interest rates. I suspect I was not alone in that expectation.
But there was no such indication. Instead, some of Warsh's most memorable remarks focused on AI — from its potential to "fundamentally transform" the conduct of monetary policy to its still-uncertain impact on jobs.
Krishna Srinivasan, director of the IMF's Asia and Pacific Department, noted that since the launch of ChatGPT, job postings requiring emerging AI skills have climbed up with AI capability, with growth roughly twice as fast in occupations highly exposed to the technology.
These discussions have dredged up some of the Gen X angst I thought I had buried back in the 2000s. As a journalist, I'm quite grateful that AI has helped me transcribe interviews, conduct research, distill huge amounts of data and do some light copy editing. But as the prevalence of AI slop online attests, feeding data into a large language model can also produce a news report — whether it is worth reading is another matter.
This has been a recurring subject of many late-night drinking sessions with my colleagues in Hong Kong and Manila. I've always argued that AI cannot conduct interviews, build relationships with important contacts or produce truly in-depth stories. But with AI already taking over many tasks traditionally done by journalists, is it only a matter of time before it replaces journalists themselves?
I left Bangkok with mixed feelings about what the future holds for my profession. It was only after returning to my desk in the newsroom in Hong Kong that I had the chance to reflect more.
AI may be able to access and process mountains of information. But only human journalists have the capacity to verify questionable data, provide the context needed to make sense of facts and figures, demand accountability to stop abuses, and foster understanding and connections with their audiences.
We are still here, and we will remain relevant. Because in the age of AI, journalists have become more important than ever.
The author is a China Daily correspondent based in Hong Kong.
