Zürcher Nachrichten - Poll finds public turning to AI bots for news updates

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 evolution of media.

Just seven percent of people report using AI to find news, according to the poll of 97,000 people in 48 countries, carried out by YouGov.

But the proportion is higher among the young, at 12 percent of under-35s and 15 percent 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 percent), translate (24 percent) or recommend (21 percent) 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 platform of French AI firm Mistral 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.

- News still a draw for X -

The Reuters Institute report also 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 institute found that many are still using Elon Musk-owned social media platform X for news, despite a rightward shift since the world's richest man took it over.

"Many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently," the authors wrote.

Some 23 percent of people in the United States reported using X for news, up eight percent on 2024's survey, with usage also rising in countries like Australia and Poland.

By contrast, "rival networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of two percent or less for news", the Reuters Institute found.

N.Fischer--NZN