Zhang, Xiaoke, Myunghwan Lee, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “From Enthusiasm to Reality: Evaluating Generative AI’s Role in Modern Journalism”, Work-in-progress.
- Presentations: UBC (2024)
Generative AI (GenAI), initially greeted with enthusiasm for its potential for content creation, encounters challenges when applied in professional settings such as journalism. These challenges, including the generation of inaccurate outputs, inconsistencies, and a reduction in human accountability, may pose conflicts with the core journalistic values of accuracy, transparency, and credibility. Our research investigates the impact of GenAI in news media leveraging a unique empirical setting when a major news outlet in South Korea launched a GenAI-powered news editor to assist its journalists in news production in December 2023. Our preliminary analysis of 196,288 news articles published between June 2023 and April 2024 suggests that GenAI adoption has not led to a significant increase in productivity, indicating persistent challenges in effectively integrating GenAI into journalistic workflows. Our study seeks to further explore this phenomenon by addressing two primary questions. First, we will conduct a survival analysis to identify effective GenAI strategies that lead to consistent GenAI use and positive outcomes in news production. Second, we will examine the impact of GenAI on the overall media news output (e.g., local vs. global; factual vs. opinion news) and discuss its broader implications in ideology formation (e.g., polarization). This research will contribute to the nascent literature on GenAI’s impact on digital platforms by providing a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon.