Although AI use is now widespread among U.K. journalists, they still see it as much more of a threat than an opportunity.
By Neil Thurman, Sina Thasler-Kordonouri and Richard Fletcher
Although a few larger surveys of how journalists use artificial intelligence have taken place, some mostly surveyed early adopters and others didn’t distinguish between current use and planned future use.
So we decided to survey a representative sample of journalists — in the U.K. We asked about their and their newsrooms’ actual use of AI and how they perceived and approached it. The results were published in our recent report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Overall, the results show that most journalists (56%) use AI professionally weekly, including 27% who use AI on a daily basis. Only 16% said they had never worked with AI on a journalistic task.
The three most frequent uses are for language processing (transcription, translation, grammar checking). These tasks may top the list because the accuracy problems associated with AI output are probably of less concern in these contexts than they would be for tasks such as fact-checking. Nevertheless, our findings clearly show that journalists are also using AI for substantive journalistic tasks. More than a fifth use AI at least monthly for “story research” and 16% for “idea generation” and “generating parts of text articles.” At the other end of the scale, AI is rarely used for still image or video generation.
Full article: https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/journalists-may-see-ai-as-a-threat-to-the-industry-but-theyre-using-it-anyway/
Photo: https://www.istockphoto.com
