Writing the AI-wrongs in journalism
- Ufrieda Ho
The rise of AI in journalism signals the time for guidelines around disclosure, transparency and accountability.
More than this, it’s time for journalism to do the work of rebuilding trust and restoring its value.
“I don’t trust mainstream media anymore; I prefer to get my news from X. It’s not as biased,” says the woman at the lunch table.
“But you’re just being fed posts from an algorithm, it’s an echo chamber,” says her husband, seated next to her.
“Now he’s going to say I’m being brainwashed,” she says, elbowing him with a chuckle. “But I’m not. You can follow anyone on X – even Barack Obama.”
Her husband picks at his plate, silent.
This actual exchange happened just after Trump won the American election in November 2024. This brief conversation sums up the very deep, troubled waters into which journalism has drifted.
Relationship, reach, and ranting
Let’s unpack this. First, the audiences have crashed out of love with journalism, resulting in a massive trust deficit.
Second, journalism is up against social media’s astounding reach (with the backing of rich owners who are the Big Tech monopoly). Algorithms are insidiously powerful as they crush through users’ data, creating so-called personalised content that’s pushed out relentlessly. This ‘samey’ content – sometimes outright disinformation and misinformation – reinforces the user’s view. But it is ‘curation’ that strips out context, nuance, opposing views and a broader range of sources.
Third, because social media’s influence fuels emotionally charged responses, it shapes people’s opinions in a way that makes less room to engage, challenge and debate. It leaves people feeling more angry, more disappointed, and further removed from those who don’t share their views.
‘Death’ of the newsroom
This is the reality of the world in which journalism operates – aggravated by disruptions within newsrooms themselves, many of which are now operating virtually or are depleted. They rely on freelance journalists who are underpaid and unprotected, or they use contributing writers who have primary paid jobs. These newsrooms also rely on articles produced by niche journalism outlets, most of which are donor-funded, disseminating news through a free-to-use content sharing model.
Journalism digitally disrupted
Dr Nechama Brodie, a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media Theory at the Wits Centre for Journalism and an author and researcher, worked as a journalist for 25 years. She sets out how digital disruption changed and continues to change journalism in South Africa.
“Going back at least 15 years, we saw the start of mainstream news organisations pushing to build more prominent websites and taking more of their content online. There was a lot of investing in digitisation – from so-called digital consultants and gurus, who turned out not to be gurus – hoping that digitisation would somehow bump up traffic and be a revenue boost. What media owners failed to do was invest in journalism,” she explains. “So, we've seen this erosion of journalism skills in favour of digitisation, but we've also seen losses of revenue amongst news media.”
Digitisation has not been all bad, making it even trickier with which to get to grips. For instance, Brodie points out, it has also had several “amazing benefits”. It’s allowing for better desktop-based fact-checking, easier transcription, data sorting, better access to contacting a wider variety of people and different resources.
But this has often come at the cost of the practise of journalism, which has been weakened. Brodie says that this is clear in the woefully thin coverage of news or big issues. It’s made audiences feel that journalism has less impact, less relevance, and is simply out of touch.
Brodie says, “Diversity is also not happening – news titles are concentrated within the same large media companies, many of community and regional newspapers are shrinking, or don't exist anymore. The whole idea of a robust journalism system is that we shouldn't only have one voice; there should be lots of different voices.”
Impact of ai on journalism
Then there’s the latest newsroom disrupter: how artificial intelligence is reshaping newsrooms and how journalists work. Brodie says that it’s important first to understand AI – its strength and also its weaknesses.
“The biggest problem that we see right now is not so-called AI writing individual articles, but using these technologies to scrape and generate aggregated summaries. AI is not intelligent; it’s stochastic [having random probability] – it's like a parrot that’s able to repeat words without necessarily attributing meaning to those words. Something like ChatGPT is a large language model that is fed massive amounts of data in the form of other people's writing and can calculate the statistical probability of one word following another, or a group of words in context with each other.”
ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by Californian company OpenAI. The bots are trained, says Brodie – fed data that is generated by humans and therefore have the same biases as we do. There are inherent features in the programming that create glitches. It means AI makes mistakes.
For this article, questions were put to ChatGPT on how it gets things wrong. The generated responses were, “AI tools still face significant challenges in fully preventing the spread of disinformation. Also, that it “generates persuasive-sounding but false content … making it difficult for users to distinguish truth from fiction”.
ChatGPT added that “the global, interconnected nature of the internet means that misinformation can spread rapidly, and different cultural, legal, and societal norms make it hard to implement universal solutions.”
Brodie says that a start is to recognise these limitations of AI, then there must be a push for better guidelines for the use of AI in journalism that includes more transparency, disclosure, and tracking.
“Journalism is not about filling a page with words – it’s about a thought process, about conceptualising something, also showing the original sources and referencing,” she says.
Whither AI and journalism?
Brodie says that restoring trust in journalism comes down to doing the work to build credibility. It’s important for journalism to show that it can take responsibility and accountability as it argues for its unique value to be recognised.
Pheladi Sethusa, a Lecturer in the Wits Centre for Journalism and the Editor of Vuvuzela, the student newspaper, says, “The recurring theme we hear is for honesty about where and how AI is being used. These are the right kinds of conversations taking place about creating working principles and frameworks when it comes to the use of AI in journalism, but its broad implementation is going to be the next hurdle to get over.”
Sethusa warns that using AI cannot be the easy “temptation to subsidise our work” just because journalism faces multiple constraints. Relying disproportionately on AI, she believes, exacerbates the crisis of reporting that is “narrowly focused, un-nuanced and devoid of context and care.”
There are practical solutions though, she says. Along with industry guidelines for AI use, there should be drives to improve media literacy, starting at primary school level. “Teaching children from early on what the news looks like; explaining the minutiae of how news works is critical,” she says. It’s the grounding that children need to recognise news versus messaging from advertisers, promotors, politicians or those with social media influence. It’s education to understand bias, to verify sources, and to inculcate the practice of read-more-widely, she adds.
But this is also not the moment to crumble under the multiple crises facing journalism and journalists, says Sethusa. “This is the moment we get to decide how we want to reshape journalism; to redefine it. It’s to go back to core principles; to lean back into our humanity as journalists, because the machine will never be able to relate to people in the ways that journalists can.”
- Ufrieda Ho is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in?Curiosity,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 18th issue, themed #Work, which delves into the evolving nature of work, shaped by societal shifts, technological advances, and equity challenges.