Artificial Intelligence Ushers in a New Era of News Production, Raising Hopes and Hard Questions

In late 2022, with the public debut of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence entered a period of rare visibility and public fascination. Suddenly, AI chatbots, automated translation tools, and robotic news-writing software have become central talking points in newsrooms worldwide. A newly released review of nearly 700 research articles, spanning from 2014 to 2023, shows how swiftly AI has transformed journalism and how scholars are grappling with its implications.
A Surging Tide of Research
The surge in AI studies has been dramatic. In 2014, only a handful of published articles addressed the intersection of artificial intelligence and journalism. By 2023, that figure had soared to nearly 150 published papers in a single year. Much of this work appears in leading scholarly journals dedicated to the future of news—especially the British titles Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Journalism Practice, along with the Spanish publication Profesional de La Información.
Behind this upswing in academic interest is a flurry of newsroom experimentation. As advertising revenue slumps and competition from social media platforms intensifies, major news organizations are investing millions of dollars in automation, personalized news recommendations, and other AI-driven initiatives. One study estimates that more than 75 percent of media companies have already incorporated some form of artificial intelligence, aiming to streamline production and cut costs.
The Four Waves of AI
Ioscolet, Conçalves and Quadros notes in their research article the four waves of AI (internet, business AI, perception AI and autonomous AI). Generative AI—typified by ChatGPT—represents the latest stage of this progression. In the wake of its release, news outlets have eagerly tested AI’s capacity to generate text, images, audio, and video for publication. That shift has helped fuel lively debates about the role of journalists in an AI-powered newsroom. One pressing question: Will the proliferation of these tools help human reporters—or replace them?
Newsgathering, Production, and Distribution
In academic work, AI’s impact on journalism is typically analysed into three stages: finding information, producing content, and distributing it to the public. Most scholarly attention has focused on the production stage—where algorithms write sports recaps, produce earnings reports, and even handle political coverage. Well before ChatGPT arrived, some news outlets used automated systems to convert structured data (like box scores or weather tables) into short stories.
With generative AI, computers can now craft entire articles—no structured template required. Researchers point out that readers sometimes struggle to tell machine-written stories from human-produced ones. Yet while automated reporting may shine in data-heavy topics like sports or business, questions loom over its fact-checking capabilities and potential biases. Under the pressure of instantaneous publishing, how do editors verify the accuracy of a robot’s output?
Scholars have also looked at audience perceptions. Ioscolet, Conçalves and Quadros notes that several studies reveal readers often rate automated articles as equally credible—if not slightly more objective—than those produced by humans, especially for routine subjects packed with statistics. But experts warn that such results may not carry over to stories requiring deep investigative work, human insight, or moral judgment. An example of this is the debacle of Apple where its AI generated fake news headlines to its users (Reilly, 2025, Online).
Ethical Gray areas and Regulatory Gaps
Curiously, the review found relatively few heavily cited articles confronting the ethical, regulatory, or educational challenges linked to AI-driven reporting—despite the subject’s obvious urgency in journalistic and public debates. Some experts fear an influx of AI-driven disinformation, while others worry that news personalisations and recommendation systems create “filter bubbles,” limiting the diversity of content readers see. Algorithmic gatekeeping is already shaping which headlines flourish online and which fade into obscurity—often according to opaque criteria set by tech giants. Also, some fear that this might negatively impact journalism as the 4th Estate.
When it comes to ethics, one persistent critique is transparency. Some argue that if newsrooms rely on AI, readers deserve to know: Who—or what—created this text? Others highlight the danger of unintentional bias programmed into AI systems. After all, the data that train these algorithms may reflect societal prejudices, amplifying them in the news.
A Transformative—But Not Inevitable—Future
Despite concerns, many journalism scholars emphasise that AI is a tool, not a destiny. While programs excel at repetitive tasks—transcribing interviews or writing short, data-driven stories—human journalists still handle nuanced coverage that requires investigative skill, empathy, and ethical judgment. News organizations, for their part, are under financial and competitive pressure to adopt AI to keep pace in an industry reshaped by digital platforms.
“Survival in this capitalist era means the ability to innovate and reinvent,” the authors of the review note. They see AI’s rising influence in the media as part of a broader, techno-economic transition known as Industry 4.0 (also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution), marked by the use of big data, robotics, and interconnected systems.
As more newsrooms blend human and machine labor, tensions are inevitable. Are algorithms or editors best suited to decide which issues deserve coverage? Can AI reliably guard against disinformation, or might it inadvertently spread it at record speed? Will news consumers trust a story if they suspect it was conjured by code?
Though many questions remain unresolved, the direction of AI’s adoption in journalism suggests that the newsroom of the near future will be a decidedly hybrid space—one where reporters and algorithms collaborate to break stories more quickly, tailor coverage more precisely, and distribute news more widely than ever before. Whether these new capacities deepen the public’s trust or strain it further could hinge on the ethical frameworks and editorial gatekeeping put in place today.
Sources:
Ioscote, F. Conçalves, A. Quandros, C. 2024. Artificial Intelligence in Journalism: A ten-year retrospective of scientific articles (2014-2023). Journalism and Media 5: 873-891.
Reilly, L. 2025. Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake news. CNN, Online as at 25 January 2025). https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/16/media/apple-ai-news-fake-headlines/index.html
Feature photo:
OpenAI. (2025). A modern editorial illustration depicting how artificial intelligence is transforming journalism. Generated by DALL·E on January 25, 2025.