As people are growing more comfortable with AI — for seeing out information, for generating their own content, for automating tasks — so too are they more comfortable with the tool being used in a variety of news and journalism tasks, according to research from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
In surveying consumers across six countries, Reuters Institute found 12% are very or somewhat comfortable with their news being created entirely by AI and 21% are comfortable if the AI has a human in the loop.
“Comfort with news production that puts humans in the driving seat is considerably higher, with 43% saying they are comfortable with news made mostly by a human with some help from AI, and 62% saying they are comfortable with news made entirely by a human journalist — up 4 percentage points compared to 2024,” write the researchers. “This change has contributed to a slight widening of the ‘comfort gap’ between AI- and human-driven news production in the last year.”
Growing Acceptance of AI in News Production
As for specific journalistic uses, comfort grew for many back-end tasks over the past year, including spelling and grammar editing (53% in 2024 to 55% this year), translating (51% to 53%), making charts and infographics (45% to 47%), and data analysis (43% to 45%).
(Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism)
Where people were less comfortable with AI in their news was in those contexts that “directly affects their user experience,” such as articles being rewritten for different people, realistic images being created if a real photo isn’t available, and the creation of an “artificial presenter or author.”
“The premium on human involvement plays to the strength of those news media willing and able to invest in original reporting and professional editing,” write the researchers, “even as they may at the same time invest aggressively in using various forms of AI for a whole slew of back-end tasks for efficiency and improved performance.”
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