The teams at AGI Ethics News and Fighter Steel Productions spent the last nine months developing and conducting The Spark Hunter Survey. We’re excited to share the results of our efforts in this issue, along with some behind-the-scenes insights into the world of journalism and the AGI beat.
We asked 31 science and technology journalists from a variety of backgrounds to answer more than 50 questions related to artificial general intelligence. Question types included multiple-choice “Likert Scale” questions to gauge sentiment and open-ended write-in questions. Participants were compensated for their time.
“Our respondents overwhelmingly favor a journalistic role rooted in skepticism and public accountability.”
What we learned, after anonymizing and then analyzing the data, was that journalists’ views appear to be in line with the general public in many respects. However, one of the key areas where they deviated from the mainstream was in how they viewed the role of journalists in reporting on AGI.
Our respondents overwhelmingly favor a journalistic role rooted in skepticism and public accountability. Yet, according to Pew Research, “three-quarters of Americans say that when journalists report on an issue or event, all sides of a story always deserve equal coverage.”
In the case of AGI, skepticism is quickly becoming a hardline stance. Firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Nvidia are all pushing the narrative that today’s large language models are either AGI or on the cusp.
“The belief that AGI tools will generate content that passes as human, despite the overall attitude of skepticism concerning AGI, could be attributed to concerns over AI-based job displacement in the journalism industry.”
This tells us that, by and large, tech and science journalists seem less likely than the average person to take the AI industry’s word for it when it comes to corporate claims relating to major advances.
That being said, 35.5% of the journalists surveyed indicated that they believe “AGI will be capable of generating creative works indistinguishable from humans within 10 years.”
The belief that AGI tools will generate content that passes as human, despite the overall attitude of skepticism concerning AGI, could be attributed to concerns over AI-based job displacement in the journalism industry. Nearly 60% of our respondents identified as freelance journalists.
The first part of the full analysis, conducted by Professor Sheldon Solomon at Skidmore College, with Findlay Tyler and Brian Newton, students in The Human Motivation Lab, appears later in this newsletter issue with dozens more insights.
The second part of the analysis will be published in next month’s issue.
We think you’ll find the results interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, to the best of our knowledge, this was the first survey on the subject of artificial general intelligence targeting journalists’ perspectives. It was also written, developed, and conducted by journalists.
The AGI Ethics News team was involved in every aspect of the survey except the laboratory analysis conducted by Professor Solomon’s group.
Secondly, despite the modest sample pool, our respondents come from around the world. While the majority of journalists who took the survey were from the United States (58.1%), there was also representation from the United Kingdom (16.1%), India (9.7%), Mexico (3.2%), Macedonia (3.2%), Kenya (3.2%), South Africa (3.2%), and Australia (3.2%). The survey was conducted in English.
And, finally, our respondents represented a big slice of the journalism sector with work experience ranging from just one year to 50 years in the industry. This allowed us to glean insights from people who’ve covered AI since it was a pet project in academia all the way through to those who started their journalism careers in the ChatGPT era.
We believe these insights will prove invaluable to the general public, researchers, and the journalism community.
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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.