Brookings - Can journalism survive AI?

CJL Director Dr. Courtney Radsch shines a light on the struggles journalism is facing as AI develops further.

Can journalism survive artificial intelligence (AI)? The answer will depend on whether journalism can adapt its business models to the AI era. If policymakers intervene to correct market imbalances, they must enforce intellectual property rights and ensure that journalism has a fighting chance in the era of generative AI.

Over the past nearly two decades, as tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft grew to become some of the most valuable companies in the world, the United States lost a third of its newspaper and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists. They cannot be replaced with AI.

Last year alone, the U.S. journalism industry slashed 2,700 jobs, and 2.5 newspapers closed each week on average. Despite a 43% rise in traffic to the top 46 news sites over the past decade, their revenues declined 56%. The dominance of less than a handful of privately owned, Silicon Valley-based tech corporations over digital advertising, publishing, audience, data, cloud, and search decimated the business models of journalism worldwide. And now AI is doing it again.

But unlike journalists, AI can not go into the courtroom or interview a defendant behind bars, meet with the grieving parents of the latest school shooting victim, cultivate the trust of a whistleblower, or brave the frontlines of the latest war. Furthermore, without access to human-created, high-quality content that is a relatively accurate portrayal of reality—and that journalism provides—the foundational models that fuel machine learning and generative AI applications of all types will malfunction, degrade, and potentially even collapse, putting the entire system at risk.

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