Newsrooms are experimenting with generative AI, warts and all

By Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston

The journalism industry has been under immense economic pressure over the past two decades, so it makes sense that journalists have started experimenting with generative AI to boost their productivity.

An Associated Press survey published in April 2024 asked journalists about the use of generative artificial intelligence in their work. Nearly 70% of those who responded said they had used these tools to generate text, whether it was composing article drafts, crafting headlines or writing social media posts.

A May 2024 global survey conducted by the public relations firm Cision found the slice to be somewhat smaller – 47% of journalists said they’d used generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard in their work.

But does the adoption of the technology pose any moral questions? After all, this is a business where professional ethics and public trust are especially important – so much so that there are fields of study devoted to it.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been researching the ethics of AI.

I think that if journalists are not careful about its deployment, the use of generative AI could undermine the integrity of their work.

How much time is really saved?

Let’s start with an obvious concern: AI tools are still unreliable.

Using them to research background for a story will often result in confident-sounding nonsense. During a 2023 demo, Google’s chatbot, Bard, famously spit out the wrong answer to a question about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s easy to imagine a journalist using the technology for background, only to end up with false information.

Therefore, journalists who use these tools for research will need to fact-check the outputs. The time spent doing that may offset any purported gains in productivity.

But to me, the more interesting questions have to do with using the technology to generate content. A reporter may have a good sense of what they want to compose, so they will ask an AI model to produce a first draft.

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