Public opinion on AI completing journalism tasks UK 2024

A survey held on AI and journalism in January 2024 in the United Kingdom found that 73 percent of respondents felt it would be acceptable for artificial intelligence to perform spelling and grammar edits to an article written by a human journalist. When asked about other uses of AI in journalism, however, the British public were less sure.

AI: a help, a hindrance, or a threat?

Whilst Brits were relatively open to AI to replacing journalists as spelling and grammar checkers and editors, they felt the opposite about the possibility of AI conducting interviews on behalf of journalists or writing and publishing long-form investigative texts that would include expert or eyewitness interviews. Overall, respondents were more open to AI performing practical tasks like recommendation, fixes, or image selection. Trust is also a factor here. The most trusted combination for editing and writing news articles remains human journalists and human editors, despite respondents being relatively evenly split on whether or not this combination is trustworthy in general. Switch this to a human journalist with an AI editor and the share who considered this combination trustworthy drops by more than half, and the idea of an AI journalist and AI editor is something the British news consumer remains resistant to.

The public remain unsure about AI in news

More than half of adults said they were unsure if they had read a news article written by an AI. This indicates a general uncertainty about how an AI-written article might differ from content written by a human, and indeed, the majority feel that media organizations should be required to display the ways AI was used to create news content.