Trust or Bust A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found that a majority of news consumers are suspicious of AI being used to produce the news — a finding that comes at a time when Google’s newly debuted AI summaries keep making horrendous mistakes, while despite its obvious shortcomings, the technology continues to make inroads into the media industry. In a survey of about 100,000 people in various countries around the world, 52 percent of respondents in the US said they would be “uncomfortable” with news being produced mostly by AI. If that seems like a slim majority, the proportion who said they’d be outright comfortable with it was only 23 percent — far from broadly winning hearts and minds. Across the pond, the polls skewed even more skeptical. 63 percent of respondents in the UK said they would be uncomfortable with the heavy use of AI in journalism, while an even punier 10 percent said they’d be on board with it. So, sorry, Big Tech: all the money and hype in the world can’t always buy trust. “It was surprising to see the level of suspicion,” Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute and lead author of the report, told the news agency. “People broadly had fears about what might happen to content reliability and trust.” Shades of Gray Reuter’s analysis suggests that audiences may not be against AI’s involvement completely — or at least not for long. Its qualitative…Readers Absolutely Detest AI-Generated News Articles, Research Shows