Poll finds public turning to AI bots for news updates

People are increasingly turning to generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to follow day-to-day news, a respected media report published on Tuesday found.

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The yearly survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found “for the first time” that significant numbers of people were using chatbots to get headlines and updates, director Mitali Mukherjee wrote.

Attached to Britain's Oxford University, the Reuters Institute annual report is seen as unmissable for people following the evolution of media.

Just seven per cent of people report using Al to find news, according to the poll of 97000 people in 48 countries, carried out by YouGov.

But the proportion is higher among the young, at 12 per cent of under-35s and 15 per cent of under-25s.

The biggest-name chatbot-Open AI's ChatGPT - is the most widely used, followed by Google's Gemini and Meta’s Llama.

Respondents appreciated relevant, personalised news from chatbots.

Many more used Al to summarise (27 percent), translate (24 per cent) or recommend (21 per cent) articles, while almost one in five asked questions about current events.

Distrust remains, with those polled on balance saying Al risked making the news less transparent, less accurate and less trustworthy.

Rather than being programmed, today’s powerful Al “large language models” (LLMs) are “trained” on vast quantities of data from the web and other sources - including news media like text articles or video reports.