A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found that a majority of news consumers are suspicious of AI being used to produce the news — a finding that comes at a time when Google’s newly debuted AI summaries keep making horrendous mistakes, while despite its obvious shortcomings, the technology continues to make inroads into the media industry. (View Highlight)
In a survey of about 100,000 people in various countries around the world, 52 percent of respondents in the US said they would be “uncomfortable” with news being produced mostly by AI. If that seems like a slim majority, the proportion who said they’d be outright comfortable with it was only 23 percent — far from broadly winning hearts and minds. (View Highlight)
Across the pond, the polls skewed even more skeptical. 63 percent of respondents in the UK said they would be uncomfortable with the heavy use of AI in journalism, while an even punier 10 percent said they’d be on board with it. So, sorry, Big Tech: all the money and hype in the world can’t always buy trust. (View Highlight)
Reuter’s analysis suggests that audiences may not be against AI’s involvement completely — or at least not for long. (View Highlight)
Its qualitative research found that audiences are most comfortable with AI being used behind the scenes to streamline the work that human journalists do — but are very uneasy about the technology being used to generate content on its own. (View Highlight)
At the very least, there’s “widespread agreement” that humans should remain in the loop, though that vague baseline means that everybody will have a different idea of what that looks like. (View Highlight)
