Poll Finds Americans Are Largely Disgusted by AI-Generated News

As the United States' biggest news brands experiment with artificial intelligence in their content, readers remain unimpressed.

In a new poll conducted by Poynter and the University of Minnesota, nearly half of the survey's respondents said they don't want AI reporting the news to them — and 20 percent say that news publishers shouldn't be using the technology at all.

For the early March poll, the institutions recruited 1,128 demographically diverse people to form a representative sample of Americans. In an online survey, those respondents were asked a battery of questions about their media consumption and literacy levels before being asked about their personal AI use and their opinions regarding its use in journalism.

When asked if they had any interest in "tools that allow readers to get information by chatting with a virtual assistant or digital chatbot that delivers AI-generated answers from previously published reporting" — the kind of thing that publishers as disparate as Snopes and The Guardian are looking into — 49 percent said they had no interest at all.

In another portion of the survey, 30 percent of respondents said they had "no confidence at all" in news organizations using AI to write articles and 32 percent said the same of publishers using AI to "create images where real photographs are not available." Interestingly, more than half of the survey's respondents said they think publishers are already using generative AI to create images and articles — a trend that's been demonstrated before, and which is certainly not helping distrust in media that has for years been sown by Donald Trump and his movement.

While there's plenty of evidence suggesting that people are becoming more comfortable with AI as it infiltrates our lives, this kind of survey reminds us that skepticism remains rampant, especially for important topics.

"The data suggests if you build it, do not expect overwhelming demand for it," explained Benjamin Toff, a University of Minnesota media expert who led this research and a similar study last year, in an interview with Poynter.

That's a great piece of advice for news organizations seeking to "leverage" these expensive and often incorrect technologies even as they harm the media industry at large. With so many studies suggesting that people are massively freaked out about AI and the way it uses our data, it's not at all surprising that they don't want it feeding or writing their news, either.

More on AI scaries: Man Alarmed as His Cognitive Skills Decay After Outsourcing Them to AI

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