How Generative AI Is Transforming Journalism: Development, Application and Ethics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript consists of an artful integration of the practices of AI-assisted or AI-enabled journalism both in the West and China as well as an integration of scholarly sources on the topic. However, given the ethical implications of AI-enabled journalism is of more and more significance, I suggest that the author spend more time and space on the ethical issues of AI use, especially provide an analysis of how those media organizations using AI to generate news reports have actually heeded or ignored such ethical issues.  I would also suggest that the author would discuss the legal implications of AI use in journalism as well given a growing number legal cases with reference to AI use. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your decision and constructive comments on my manuscript. We agree with your suggestions and will incorporate the recommended changes into the manuscript. In the fourth part of the article, we add some content, especially, we have discussed the legal implications of AI use in journalism according to your suggestion. Modified or added sentences are highlighted in red.

Thanks again for your suggestions!

 

Best wishes,

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper describes how the recent apparition of generative AI has changed the journalism landscape and way of working. The text is very clear and easy to read. It is organized with an introduction (sec 1), a reminder of the growth of generative AI and how it is used in journalism (sec 2) and (roughly speaking) the pros and cons of using GAI (sections 3 and 4). The conclusion provides some recommendations on how to mitigate the impact of the use of GAI on public information and remind readers that they should be critical while reading news in modern media.

Some remarks about the text:

Section 2.2: 'Specifically, the media is responsible for providing and establishing the agenda for original news text, GAI manages the technical implementation, and the media furnishes user interfaces'. I don't understand what this means. Maybe this should be rephrased.

Section 2.3 (and everywhere in the document) : the evaluation of the bias in the AI generated text is impossible. All data generated by any AI software is biased by the content of the database used to train it, and the choices made by the humans who created them (AI and database).

Section 3.1: 'such as collecting background information, recommending and verifying sources, and fact-checking'. This should not be left to the AI, especially verifying source and fact-checking. These tasks should always remain to journalists. Actually, I don't see how an AI could verify its sources.

Section 4.1: Actually, I think that the machine cannot do 'on-site investigations, engage in detailed interviews', so there will always remain some parts that the journalists can do independently from the machine. So full GAI news channels, such as NewsGPT (which I didn't know about before reading this paper), are limited to gathering, analysing and synthetizing information that is already written.

Section 4.2: in the paragraph dealing with Michal Simecka, please add his nationality (Slovak).

One question I have is: was any GAI used in writing this document?

My main concern, not with the paper but with the subject of the paper, is the need for readers to become critical when reading the news. This is addressed in the conclusion, but not enough emphasized to my opinion.  But this is not easy, as the reader has currently no way of knowing if a GAI was used in the process of writing the article he is reading.

One way to change that would be to create an index informing the reader of such a fact. It could be organized in various topics, as shown in section 3 (info gathering, content production, customization) and section 4 to address ethical issues (source verification, human validation of the text, etc) and presented in the form of a matrix or coloured patterns to help readers estimate of much they must trust the article they are reading.

This meta-information seems essential in the context of this paper, as 'journalists have a responsibility to actively inform the public of the truth'.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your decision and constructive comments on my manuscript. We agree with your suggestions and will incorporate the recommended changes into the manuscript. We have modified all the sentences you mentioned in your suggestions. In addition, we have drawn a figure so that readers can have a better understanding of the subject we discussed in the paper. Modified or added sentences are highlighted in red.

Thanks again for your suggestions!

 

Best wishes,

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf