In early August, CNN reporter Jim Acosta, using AI generation, conducted an “interview” about gun violence and school shootings with a dead teenager.

We’re not opposed to the use of AI in reporting or presenting the news — we’ve used it ourselves in creating illustrations and are always reviewing and contemplating what other uses the technology could offer for better serving Lycoming County and surrounding communities.

We find how CNN’s Jim Acosta used AI a couple of weeks ago, however, to be exploitative and cruel.

Joaquin Oliver tragically died about seven years ago in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. We will never know how his perspective on gun ownership — or any other issue before our nation — would have evolved. We will never know what nuances he would have perceived on this or any other issues.

His inability to grow in his understanding of our nation and of the world, of course, is only a small part of the tragedy of his loss.

With all the aspects of this terrible loss in mind, we cannot fault his grieving parents for participating in this effort.

But we certainly can fault CNN for the decision to press forward with this ghoulish exercise in taking the memory of a young man and steamrolling over who he was in favor of a political diatribe.

News outlets across the ideological spectrum are able to report on crime and gun control and on a myriad of other issues — some with a pursuit of balance and of even-handedness in mind and some without. We respect and welcome the variety of perspectives on political discourse, from the National Review and Fox News to the American Prospect and MSNBC, our freedom of speech and freedom of the press allows to flourish.

But the use of a dead teenager as a ventriloquist’s puppet, by a news channel that has a reputation, frankly on all sides of that ideological spectrum, of being incapable of approaching the news without gimmicks and cartoonish caricatures of conflict is, even for them, a new low.

We hope they — and better news outlets — are able to use AI and new technologies in ways that aren’t as tasteless in the future.