Citizen perception of artificial intelligence: impact and applications in journalism

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into journalism has significantlyreshaped the news industry, enabling automation in news production, dataanalysis, and content personalization (Ufarte-Ruiz, Murcia-Verdú, & Túñez-López, 2023; Newman et al., 2024). Media organizations are increasinglyrelying on AI-driven tools to generate financial reports, sports summaries, andother data-driven content, with some platforms fully automating certain newscategories. While AI is often seen as a means to enhance efficiency and optimizenewsroom workflows, its growing presence raises fundamental questionsabout trust, credibility, and the evolving role of journalists (Sonni et al., 2024).One of the key debates in AI-generated journalism concerns its impact onaudience trust. Some studies suggest that AI-authored articles can be perceivedas equally credible as human-written content, particularly when the AI’s roleis disclosed (Hofeditz et al., 2022). However, other research points to significantconcerns regarding transparency, accuracy, and potential biases in automatednews production (Forja-Pena et al., 2024). AI-generated journalism operates within existing corporate and media structures, which means that its neutralitycannot be assumed (Bender et al., 2021). Scholars have argued that algorithmiccontent creation may still reflect biases from the data it is trained on, theinterests of its developers, or the influence of the prompts used by humanjournalists (Mehrabi et al., 2021). These factors make the perception of AI as anobjective news source highly contested, particularly among audiences with adeeper understanding of AI technologies.