AI is becoming the gateway to information, but audiences still don't want it writing their news
AI is an information gateway. Audiences still don't want it making their news
New research from the Reuters Institute, surveying audiences across nine countries, finds that 51% now use generative AI weekly and 38% turn to it for information, up from 24% in 2025. Yet only 12% are comfortable with news made entirely by AI, rising to just 19% with human oversight. People value AI for convenience, not trust, and its rise is already eating into search and news use alike.
People see conversational AI systems as friction-reducing machines that get them information more quickly.
- _bobm
I've been thinking about the sheer volume of information I am interested in being produced every day. At current rates, I may need a few hours to thoroughly go through the entire stream in the morning.
As this rate of information production increases, this will become a full time job.
Obviously, this is not a full time job, and I think agents will fill in the "menial" work-load.
So interesting times ahead.
- saulpw
AI is good for consuming public information, not for producing public information.
- simianwords
A certain pattern I’ve noticed: people are vary of and condemn AI use in many domains; complain about hallucination and inaccuracies. In just a few years, the use of AI in these domains will become mandatory and not using AI will be almost seen as risky.
Example: if you don’t use AI as a reviewer for your code to check for vulnerabilities, it will be seen as risky - as compared to a year ago when people were complaining about hallucination.
Expect the same pattern for healthcare as well. Also journalism
- pj_mukh
But what does "used Gen AI" in an article mean?
Did they type "Write a news article make no mistakes?" and hit Publish
or
Did they use it to find secondary sources for a set of details to then manually go check them? Or use it for copy-editing or have a discussion with a frontier model about the best term to describe a concept (something I find them very good at!)? Or a myriad of such interventional uses.
Are those considered the same by the audience? Was the difference explained in this survey? I'm betting the audience is a lot more accepting of the latter and the former is what everyone imagines "Use Gen-AI" means and words like "mostly human generated with some AI help" don't really capture the difference OR value.
I hate to be the "there is nuance" guy, but...isn't there significant nuance here?
- serious_angel
Irresponsible and dead LLM/SI/AI is not an information gateway, and will never be. Limited/censored/opinionated or not.
People is the gateway, their effort, their experience, to learn from.