Zhang, Xiaoke, Myunghwan Lee, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “News Quality vs. Promptness: Investigating Large Language Models’ Impact on Modern Journalism,” Work-in-progress.

• Presentations: UBC (2024), DS (2024), CIST (2024)

The advancement of digital technologies has transformed the news industry, with large language models (LLMs) introducing new opportunities and challenges for the institutional press. Utilizing a unique setting where two major news institutions in South Korea introduced LLM-based news writing assistants, this study investigates how LLM assistance affects journalists’ news production and readers’ engagement using a mixed-method approach. We first conduct interviews and surveys with journalists to identify key constructs in journalism and develop a research model on the emerging phenomenon. We then empirically examine the impacts of LLM assistance on news production and engagement using a unique dataset of 941 LLM-assisted articles and 7,230 human-written articles on identical events. Notably, we develop a novel framework using GPT-4o to extract information sources from a large number of news articles. Our results show that LLM assistance reduces the diversity and uniqueness of information sources in news articles but increases publication promptness. Furthermore, LLM-assisted news is associated with decreased reader engagement, a trend exacerbated by reduced source diversity and uniqueness despite faster publication. This study contributes to the understanding of generative AI’s role in journalism and provides implications for the institutional press navigating the integration of AI technologies in journalistic practices.