Australians Express Distrust Towards AI-Generated News Content

While Australian media companies continue to rely on AI technology to produce more generic and simplified news content, Aussies tend to be sceptical when it comes to articles generated by generative artificial intelligence.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology first gained familiarity around late 2022, early in 2023, when a Silicon Valley company called OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT and debuted its text-to-image generator DALL-E model.

Negative impact on trust

As reported by the latest federal government survey, which involved approximately 5,000 Australians, conducted in the last few months of 2023.  61 percent of the surveyed individuals were aware of AI, while about half of them have made use of that technology.

However, there was a strong negative attitude around the deployment of this technology in news content.

Astonishingly, nearly 80 % of the polled respondents reported that they would be very disgruntled with a specific piece of news if they disclosed that it had been written entirely by generative Artificial Intelligence. Even if a story was written only with the help of artificial intelligence, half (approximately 50% ) of these Australian citizens would still be affected negatively by their trust.

However, the greatest source of anxiety was the perception that AI models draw on data from the unconfirmed or unreliable sources, followed by the matter of integrity and the comprehension that humans have the capacity to bring ethics and responsibility into the news.

Call for transparency

Approximately 95 percent of respondents with knowledge of this technology favored bestowing information about the extent of news created by generative AI to people. These came up after Channel Nine had apologized to a Victorian MP when it had already published a digitally altered photo to portray her with big breasts and a more revealing outfit in January. The alterations were attributed to Photoshop’s “generative expand” tool that uses AI to fill in the images as they are returned to their original status, as mentioned by Nine News.

Government response and regulatory outlook

In February, the federal government created an in-house artificial intelligence group with experts as members. The purpose of this group was to pinpoint the risks and outline the limits around this cutting-edge technology, yet they have not come up with the rules regulating its use.