Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off at lightning speed in the past couple of years, creating disruption in many industries. Newsrooms are no exception.
A new report published today finds that news audiences and journalists alike are concerned about how news organizations are – and could be – using generative AI such as chatbots, image, audio and video generators, and similar tools.
The report draws on three years of interviews and focus group research into generative AI and journalism in Australia and six other countries (United States, United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and France).
Only 25% of our news audience participants were confident they had encountered generative AI in journalism. About 50% were unsure or suspected they had.
This suggests a potential lack of transparency from news organizations when they use generative AI. It could also reflect a lack of trust between news outlets and audiences.
Who or what makes your news – and how – matters for a host of reasons.
Some outlets tend to use more or fewer sources, for example. Or use certain kinds of sources – such as politicians or experts – more than others.
Some outlets under-represent or misrepresent parts of the community. This is sometimes because the news outlet’s staff themselves aren’t representative of their audience.
Carelessly using AI to produce or edit journalism can reproduce some of these inequalities.
Our report identifies dozens of ways journalists and news organizations can use generative AI. It also summarizes how comfortable news audiences are with each.
The news audiences we spoke to overall felt most comfortable with journalists using AI for behind-the-scenes tasks rather than for editing and creating. These include using AI to transcribe an interview or to provide ideas on how to cover a topic.
But comfort is highly dependent on context. Audiences were quite comfortable with some editing and creating tasks when the perceived risks were lower.
The problem – and opportunity
Generative AI can be used in just about every part of journalism.
For example, a photographer could cover an event. Then, a generative AI tool could select what it “thinks” are the best images, edit the images to optimize them, and add keywords to each.
These might seem like relatively harmless applications. But what if the AI identifies something or someone incorrectly, and these keywords lead to mis-identifications in the photo captions? What if the criteria humans think make “good” images are different to what a computer might think? These criteria may also change over time or in different contexts.
Even something as simple as lightening or darkening an image can cause a furore when politics are involved.
AI can also make things up completely. Images can appear photorealistic but show things that never happened. Videos can be entirely generated with AI, or edited with AI to change their context.
Generative AI is also frequently used for writing headlines or summarizing articles. These sound like helpful applications for time-poor individuals, but some news outlets are using AI to rip off others’ content.
AI-generated news alerts have also gotten the facts wrong. As an example, Apple recently suspended its automatically generated news notification feature. It did this after the feature falsely claimed U.S. murder suspect Luigi Mangione had killed himself, with the source attributed as the BBC.
What do people think about journalists using AI?
Our research found news audiences seem to be more comfortable with journalists using AI for certain tasks when they themselves have used it for similar purposes.
For example, the people interviewed were largely comfortable with journalists using AI to blur parts of an image. Our participants said they used similar tools on video conferencing apps or when using the “portrait” mode on smartphones.
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Magazine Training International’s mission is to encourage, strengthen, and provide training and resources to Christian magazine publishers as they seek to build the church and reach their societies for Christ.
