Publishing Revolution: The AI Tools That Journalists Are Working With

Since AI software began proliferating after the release of ChatGPT, smart publishers have taken advantage of the many AI tools seemingly custom-made for their various departments.

Journalists are no exception, finding uses far beyond the basic text-generation that so many associate with AI’s rise. And with further AI transparency will come further trust and value in human oversight, keeping any existential job-concerns at bay and allowing journalists to ultimately do their best work.

New research from Muck Rack is showing just how resourceful journalists are in the AI era, finding that more than three-quarters (77%) of journalists use AI tools.

“ChatGPT is the most widely adopted tool amongst journalists with 42% saying they have used it for work in the last year,” says the State of Journalism 2025 report. “Transcription and writing tools are the next most popular [at] 40% and 35% respectively.”

(Source: Muck Rack)

Other AI platforms that journalists have used for work include:

• Gemini (13%)
• AI tools specially designed for their newsroom (11%)
• Perplexity AI (8%)
• Claude (6%)
• Adobe or Photoshop AI features (5%)
• AI image generators (4%)
• AI speech-to-text tools (3%)
• AI coding assistants (2%)

6% responded “other,” and of course, I would have loved to dive deeper into that to see some of those unsaid uses. Similarly, I would have loved follow-ups to narrow down the specific AI uses that journalists have from using those larger platforms like ChatGPT, whether that’s for preliminary research akin to Googling or submitting existing content to generate, say, relevant hashtags or other data for SEO purposes or social media.

So long as journalists continue to work with available resources responsibly — as they have long been trusted to do — then one has to imagine that AI adoption rate will only increase as AI tools develop with them in mind.