A new industry report has found audiences and journalists are growing increasingly concerned by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism.
Summarising three years of research, the Generative AI & Journalism report was launched on Tuesday, February 18.
Report lead author, Dr T.J. Thomson from RMIT said the potential of AI-generated or edited content to mislead or deceive was of most concern.
“The concern of AI being used to spread misleading or deceptive content topped the list of challenges for both journalists and news audiences,” he said.
“We found journalists are poorly equipped to identify AI-generated or edited content, leaving them open to unknowingly propelling this content to their audiences.”
According to the report, this was partly down to few newsrooms having systematic processes in place to vet user-generated or community contributed visual material.
Most journalists interviewed for the report were not aware of the extent to which AI is increasingly and often invisibly being integrated into both cameras and image or video editing and processing software.
“AI is sometimes being used without the journalists or news outlet even knowing,” Dr Thompson said.
While only one quarter of news audiences surveyed for the report thought they had encountered generative AI in journalism, about half were unsure or suspected they had.
“This points to a potential lack of transparency from news organisations when they use generative AI or to a lack of trust between news outlets and audiences,” Dr Thomson said.
News audiences were found to be more comfortable with journalists using AI when they themselves have used it for similar purposes, such as to blur parts of an image.
“The people we interviewed mentioned how they used similar tools when on video conferencing apps or when using the portrait mode on smartphones,” Dr Thomson said.
“We also found this with journalists using AI to add keywords to media since audiences had themselves experienced AI describing images in word processing software.”
Dr Thomson said that news audiences and journalists alike were overall concerned about how news organisations are – and could be – using generative AI.
“Most of our participants were comfortable with turning to AI to create icons for an infographic but quite uncomfortable with the idea of an AI avatar presenting the news, for example,” he said.
The report can be viewed at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28068008
