It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.

But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!

Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.

Why would they need AI to do any of those things? Wrong statements should be caught by editors and fact-checkers.

It more sounds like you're wanting people to shoehorn in AI where it doesn't belong.

Is there anything you can point to that demonstrates how journalism has been improved by AI research?

I'm not sure who has the religious issue.