News organisations are using AI but many are concerned about its ethical implications, survey shows

A majority of news organisations globally are using artificial intelligence (AI) in at least one aspect of their work, but many remain concerned about the ethical implications of doing so.

That is according to the second global survey of news organisations conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE)'s JournalismAI project.

A total of 105 news and media organisations in 46 different countries completed the survey between April and July 2023.

Nearly three in four news organisations said that they were using AI in either news gathering, production or distribution, and around 80 per cent of respondents expect that AI will have a larger role in their newsrooms in the future.

But more than half said they were concerned about the "ethical implications of AI integration for editorial quality and other aspects of journalism", the survey found.

"Journalists are trying to figure out how to integrate AI technologies in their work upholding journalistic values like accuracy, fairness, and transparency," the report authors wrote.

They added that some journalists fear AI technologies could further commercialise the industry and erode public trust.

Just one-third of survey respondents said their news organisations were ready to deal with the challenges of using AI in the newsroom.

A similar number of respondents said that their newsrooms had an institutional strategy for using the technologies or were developing one.

Around 85 per cent of survey respondents said that they had at least experimented with generative AI to help with writing code, image generation and authoring summaries.

"Journalism around the world is going through another period of exciting and scary technological change," said the director of LSE's JournalismAI