AI Versus Accuracy? We’re Willing to Make the Trade-Off.
When asking AI about the news, readers “know the answers they are getting are not perfect.” They keep asking anyway.
Researchers who study AI and journalism are identifying a striking tension: people who use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and summarization features such as Google’s AI Overview to find news seem to prefer them over clicking on individual stories, despite being conscious that chatbots have limits when it comes to accuracy.
“They know the answers they are getting are not perfect,” said Nick Hagar, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Generative AI in the Newsroom (GAIN) initiative, as they previewed new research during a recent Tow Center panel on AI search and news. “But it’s just so convenient for them to be able to ask a quick query, have the AI search, and get a nice, condensed response, that the trade-off is worth it for a lot of these folks, for most of what they’re doing.”
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