How are audiences feeling about AI in 2025?

Many Americans have a lot to worry about right now. But, among those things, AI remains an issue, especially when it comes to news. From a piece by Alex Mahadevan for Poynter:

Nearly half of Americans say they don’t want news from generative artificial intelligence, according to a wide-ranging study from Poynter and the University of Minnesota on how audiences feel about AI. Twenty percent of people say publishers shouldn’t use AI at all.

These are significant numbers, and reinforce the idea that we should be taking a careful, strategic approach to AI in our work. It feels like all the pressure is on us “keep up”, and that’s an unsurprising response, given how often the industry has been blindsided by new tech. But the audience resistance to AI-created news experiences is something we should be wary of.

The Bad Egg AI problem

We already have a trust problem, as this finding makes clear:

Large swaths of news audiences think publishers are using AI to write articles or create photos. More than a quarter of those surveyed think newsrooms are using AI to write the text of stories often or all the time.

Unfortunately, this is a case of a few bad eggs making life harder for the rest of us. We’re already seeing all journalism lumped together as “the media” or, worse, the “mainstream media” (typically shortened to MSM). So, t only takes a few negatives reports about shoddy AI-written content to taint the whole industry.

But that’s not to say we should ignore AI. That’s a mistake — because we can use it to build products with a clear value proposition to the audience seems to be working, as another example in the Poynter piece makes clear:

An EU election chatbot developed by Swedish publisher Aftonbladet answered more than 150,000 questions from the audience, and a content marketing virtual assistant deployed by Ringier Axel Springer in Poland to boost German tourism generated 33,000 unique travel plans for users.

Trust and transparency

And so, as is so frequently the case, this is about trust. And trust is about transparency. And, again, that’s picked up by the research:

Of the most engaged news consumers — those with high levels of news literacy — more than 90% want disclosures for AI-generated text and photo editing.

Those “most engaged news consumers”? They’re the ones most likely to pay. They are our core audience. Mess with their trust in you at your peril.