In fact, a recent report on the use of AI in news media from the Reuters Institute showed a pretty clear pattern of audiences' trust declining the more AI was used in the journalistic process. Only 12% of people were comfortable with fully AI-generated content, increasing to 21% for mostly AI, 43% for mostly human, and a respectable (but, notably, not amazing) 62% for fully human content.
The question today isn't whether we are using AI in journalism, because we do it already," but whether "we can do journalism without outsourcing our skepticism, our ethics, and our sense of accountability, both as journalists ourselves and the accountability we are asking people and organizations that hold power to provide," said Sideris who is studying how generative AI can better assist investigative reporting as a 2026 Nieman Fellow.
The Connecticut Mirror's new artificial intelligence data reporter and product developer is trying to figure out how to tell stories that were previously impossible because of the volume of documents or deadline pressure. In Connecticut, where news is often made in municipal meetings, the nonprofit's beat reporters can't make it to all 169 different towns, Eichhorst said. One of her goals is to generate leads and get material from those meetings to reporters using AI tools.
