All the evidence suggests that daily news writers are an endangered species. I give it ten years before AI takes over the breaking news beat entirely. Sooner if artificial general intelligence is developed before then.
I was one of the first journalists on the AI beat. Recently, I had the privilege of helping write, develop, and conduct the first ever “Spark Hunter Survey.” We surveyed 31 science and technology journalists to get their insights on the topic of artificial general intelligence.
“Every model advancement brings us one step closer to one of these possibilities becoming reality.”
We then had a team of experts led by world-renowned researcher Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore University analyze the anonymized data to give us a detailed picture of what our respondents really thought. You can read their takeaways here:
Journalistic Perspectives on Artificial General Intelligence
In this essay, I’ll lay out my reactions to both the data itself and the experience of conducting the survey and talking to dozens of my peers. I’ll also explain why I think the traditional newsroom and the “daily news reporter” are in danger of obsoletion.
My hope is that AGI serves as a tool that helps free journalists from the shackles of click-based revenue. Instead of spending our days aping each other’s coverage in a competition to see who can cover the most news, we could be spending our time covering the things that matter most to us as journalists, writers, and humans.
My fear is that rather than pivoting toward stronger reporting, better writing, and more humanlike stories immediately, major daily news platforms will double down on the current model. They’ll try to squeeze the “clicks equals dollars” advertising-based revenue model for all its worth and, in doing so, flood the internet with AI-generated news that nobody cares about.
Every model advancement brings us one step closer to one of these possibilities becoming reality.
Journalistic Perspectives
We conducted a survey of 31 science and technology journalists from around the world to get a sense of how they felt about artificial general intelligence (AGI).
As one respondent put it: “AGI is a hypothetical type of AI that can match or surpass human performance across any cognitive tasks. Unlike narrow AI, it excels across many intellectual domains.”
When we asked the journalists to gauge their own level of competency, only two indicated they had expert-level knowledge on key institutions and leaders in AGI research or current debates about AGI safety and ethics. Only one respondent claimed expert-level knowledge on recent scientific or technical breakthroughs relevant to AGI.
“The reality is that most of the money in online print journalism comes from advertising dollars.”
This tracks with my overall experience as a journalist. We’re not always the experts on a subject, but we usually have decent access to people who are. Unfortunately, the way breaking news is covered, we don’t usually have time to reach out to those experts.
When most people think about journalism, they either imagine the people they see on TV and in videos (broadcast journalists, influencers) or they think of investigative journalists who travel all over to get big scoops and uncover the truth (ProPublica, The New York Times).
The reality is that most of the money in online print journalism comes from advertising dollars. And those are earned via clicks. The more eyes a journalist can get on a webpage, the more money the publisher makes.
A popular journalist at the New York Times might expect one of their online breaking news articles to generate 150,000 pageviews in the first day or two. And at outlets such as The Verge or TechCrunch, some reporters only write feature articles. They may only publish two or three articles a week.
But most full time online reporters, especially those working at smaller outlets, can expect around 2,000 to 5,000 pageviews per article on average. This means that the vast majority of people who write the news are basically just shift workers trying to meet a daily quota.
A typical breaking news reporter is responsible for sourcing, pitching, researching, writing, and editing between five and ten news articles per shift. At 300-500 words each, reporters and editors are essentially racing to conduct due diligence.
In order to move this quickly, most breaking news reporters source their stories from two places: press releases and breaking news stories already published by other outlets.
Tomorrow’s newsroom
It takes a very specific skillset to cover breaking news. Reporters have to take a topic they might know nothing about and turn bits of scattered information into a cohesive, informative, and entertaining piece of writing within a couple of hours. In the breaking news format, it’s more about the speed of a journalist’s workflow than their ability to turn a phrase.
Unfortunately, these are skills that LLMs currently possess.
A sufficiently capable AGI agent should, hypothetically speaking, find it trivial to scrape news stories from social media posts and press release sites to facilitate automated news writing and publishing.
Most of our survey respondents indicated that research towards the development of AGI was going faster than the general public perceives. If they’re right, then AGI is just around the corner.
“Overall, it seems that science and technology journalists are skeptical and untrusting of the entire AI industry, including the media.”
And these advanced models won’t be writing the news for humans. They’ll be writing stories for the AI models that humans get their news from. Chatbot summaries are going to kill web news in the same way that web news killed newspapers.
Nicola Leech, head of audience development at Emirati newspaper The National, seems to agree. In a report from the Reuters Institute examining the proliferation of AI news tools, they were quoted as saying “the broader picture will be declining traffic, but discerning, high-intent readers will increasingly use LLM apps not for full stories, but to decide which to consume and why.”
Are advertisers going to keep paying premium click rates for news sites if most of the clicks are from chatbots?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, our survey respondents are worried about the future. But it isn’t the machines that scare them. It’s the people making them.
Though they disagreed on many questions, when it came to the trustworthiness of the people building and governing the use of advanced AI systems our respondents almost unanimously expressed negative sentiment.
They were overwhelmingly convinced that C-suite executives are clueless when it comes to the AI to AGI transition. In fact, only one person surveyed thought that corporate decision-makers were “well informed” when it comes to AGI.
We asked “what do you perceive as the primary motivations behind the current push for AGI development?” And 87.1 percent of respondents selected: “economic profit and market dominance.”
Our survey takers were just as critical of the news media as they were of others. Only one respondent agreed with the statement “current media discussions about AGI are balanced and objective.” The other 30 selected either strongly disagree (16%) disagree (42%), or neither agree nor disagree (39%).
Overall, it seems that science and technology journalists are skeptical and untrusting of the entire AI industry, including the media.
It should then come as no surprise then that nearly 60% of our respondents identified as freelance reporters — this aligns with greater industry employment trends and the shift away from traditional newsrooms.
Ultimately, the future of journalism in a world where AGI can cover the news faster than us is one where opinions, editorials, expert analysis, and human-centric feature articles must become the focus.
News outlets must find a way to move past click-based advertising revenue as a primary source of income and figure out how to turn a profit serving news articles to the chatbots who curate what newsreaders consume.
Ethical concerns addressed in this article:
- What is the ethical duty of governments and corporations to citizens whose cognitive labor is rendered obsolete by AGI?
- How can we ensure that AGI development is aligned with the broader interests and values of global society, rather than those of a narrow group?
- Does AGI facilitate access to information, freedom of expression, and pluralism in media and communications?
Get sharper analysis on AGI ethics
Original essays, expert commentary, and curated analysis on the human stakes of AGI.
A veteran AI journalist, Tristan was the creator and managing editor of The Next Web’s “Neural” imprint. He is one of the first and most prolific reporters to cover artificial intelligence as a full-time beat.