Chinese robot pictured at Web Summit in Lisbon. Picture: Press Gazette/Dominic Ponsford
Members of the public in the UK place huge value on real human-generated journalism and are deeply distrustful of AI in the media , according to a major new survey.
UK news industry marketing body Newsworks commissioned a survey of 4,000 UK adults by One Poll carried out in October and November.
Asked about the role of AI in news production, some 84% of respondents said it makes human editorial judgment more important.
Asked to name three ways AI is affecting “you or society” the most popular answers were that it could reduce “human critical thinking or intelligence” and help “spread misinformation or false content”.
Most UK national newsbrands do not use AI to write stories for publication. However, unscrupulous PR agencies have used the technology to industrialise the production of fake press releases which have been published more than 1,000 times in mainstream UK news publications .
IPSO-regulated newsbrands have published hundreds of these stories, which often feature AI-generated images of imaginary spokespeople, exposing failures in the editorial checking process.
Reach publications use AI to rewrite stories for syndication in different titles across the network and to write news stories based on weather bulletins.
Local newspaper group Newsquest uses AI to write stories for publication based on press releases and information from council agendas.
In the US, unionised journalists have launched a News Not Slop campaign highlighting concerns about the use of AI in content production.
The News Guild said: “Technology, like AI, can be a very helpful tool to speed up and automate tasks. It can help a novice programmer write faster code to scrape data from a website. It can help sift through hundreds of thousands of emails for an investigation.
“However, it should remain a supplement to human work and should not be used to write and publish articles without human oversight. Machines create slop without human control, don’t have feelings and don’t care about the facts. Journalists must have the final say in published work.”
Publishers including Reach and the Daily Mail group are currently investing heavily in creator-led news. This has involved recruiting non-journalists with strong social media production skills to produce personality-led news content for publications on platforms like Tiktok and Instagram.
The Newsworks survey found that 79% of respondents are finding it harder at times to tell the difference between professional journalists and independent news commentators.
Some 86% of respondents said it was important to them that the news they consume is produced by trained journalists rather than social media influencers.
Overall, the research found a high degree of appreciation for the role of journalism in society among the UK general public.
Some 89% said journalism has an important role in society, 88% said it has an important role fighting misinformation and fake news on social media and 90% said investigative journalism that exposes corruption and verifies facts has an important role in today’s digital era.
Some 76% of respondents said it was important that advertisers support independent journalists and newsrooms.
Newsworks chief executive Jo Allan said: “It is encouraging that the British public’s appreciation for journalism has continued to grow, as is their call for advertisers to back newsrooms and ensure readers can continue to access news they can trust and rely on.”
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