Poll finds public turning to AI bots for news updates
PARIS: People are increasingly turning to generative artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT to follow day-to-day news, a respected media report published Tuesday found.
The yearly survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found "for the first time" that significant numbers of people were using chatbots to get headlines and updates, director Mitali Mukherjee wrote.
Attached to Britain's Oxford University, the Reuters Institute annual report is seen as unmissable for people following the ways the media is changing.
Just seven per cent of people report using AI to find news, according to the Institute's poll of 97,000 people in 48 countries, carried out by YouGov.
But the proportion is higher among the young, at 12 per cent of under-35s and 15 per cent of under-25s.
The biggest-name chatbot – OpenAI's ChatGPT – is the most widely used, followed by Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama.
Respondents appreciated relevant, personalised news from chatbots.
Many more used AI to summarise (27 per cent), translate (24 per cent) or recommend (21 per cent) articles, while almost one in five asked questions about current events.
Distrust remains, with those polled on balance saying AI risked making the news less transparent, less accurate and less trustworthy.
Rather than being programmed, today's powerful AI "large language models" (LLMs) are "trained" on vast quantities of data from the web and other sources – including news media like text articles or video reports.
Once trained, they are able to generate text and images in response to users' natural-language queries.
But they present problems including "hallucinations", the term used when AI invents information that fits patterns in their training data but is not true.
Scenting a chance at revenue in a long-squeezed market, some news organisations have struck deals to share their content with developers of AI models.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) allows the Mistral model from the French company of the same name to access its archive of news stories going back decades.
Other media have launched copyright cases against AI makers over alleged illegal use of their content, for example the New York Times against ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Away from AI, the Reuters Institute report pointed to traditional media – TV, radio, newspapers and news sites – losing ground to social networks and video-sharing platforms.
Almost half of 18–24-year-olds report that social media like TikTok is their main source of news, especially in emerging countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand.
The shift in news consumption habits has hit outlets' bottom lines.
Tuesday's report said it has also given a leg-up to politicians like US President Donald Trump or Argentina's Javier Milei, who have been able to talk past traditional gatekeepers to reach voters directly.
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