Report – T. J. Thomson, Ryan Thomas, Michelle Riedlinger, RMIT University, 17 February 2025

Generative AI & journalism – Content, journalistic perceptions and audience experiences

This evidence-based report aims to familiarise the reader with a wide array of AI in journalism use cases, provide grounding on the legal and ethical issues that journalists and audiences identify regarding this technology within journalism, and reveal news audiences’ expectations regarding how this technology should or should not be used. The report ends with a series of questions for journalists and news organisations to consider as they work through their experimentation with and guidelines around AI use in journalism.

This report brings together six discrete research and engagement activities over a three-year period (2022-24), drawing on fieldwork in seven countries (Australia, Germany, USA, UK, Norway, Switzerland, and France), and focuses on AI in journalism within three broad domains: AI-generated content in journalism, journalists’ perceptions of and use of AI in journalism, and news audiences’ perceptions of and reactions to this technology being used in journalism.

Key findings

  • AI bias can take many forms.
  • AI tools and the underlying models that power them are almost always frustratingly opaque.
  • The news workers we interviewed were more comfortable with using AI for (predominantly non-photorealistic) illustrations compared to using AI as a replacement of or supplement to camera-based journalism.
  • Both journalists and audience members are concerned about the potential of AI-generated or -edited content to mislead or deceive.
  • Journalists and audience members are also concerned about the effect that generative AI will have on human labour, ability and broader social structures.
  • At the time of our interviews, a minority of the outlets whose staff we interviewed had policies in place about generative AI.
  • Both news audiences and journalists thought transparency about when and how AI was used was important.
  • Only a minority of our interviewees were confident they had encountered AI-generated or -edited content in the journalism they consumed.
  • Audience members we interviewed were more comfortable with AI tools or processes being used in journalism when they themselves had firsthand experience with such tools.

Read the full report here: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2025-02/apo-nid329601.pdf.