Robots in the News and Newsrooms: Unpacking Meta-Journalistic Discourse on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

As journalism has grappled with the potentials and boundaries of AI within the industry, journalists have produced plentiful articles detailing experimentation and potential consequences of AI-driven journalism (see, Peiser, 2019 Peiser, J. 2019, February 5. "The Rise of the Robot Reporter." The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html [Google Scholar]; GPT-33, 2020 GPT-3. 2020, September 8. "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet human?" The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 [Google Scholar]). Accordingly, this article analyzes media coverage (N = 95 articles) of AI in journalism over a 5-year period, starting in 2016 and ending in 2020, to examine prominent themes related to uses, roles, and concerns regarding AI in the newsroom. We sample coverage from 20 US and UK news media outlets representing a diversity of media with regards to media type and partisan leaning. We employ a thematic analysis on the media coverage of AI as it relates specifically to its use and application in journalism. Our exploration uncovers a tension between the industry and profession of journalism in highlighting the hopes and pitfalls of AI. It also allows for a discussion on assessing the place of AI in news making, especially with regard to the economic and contextual complexity in which news stories operate and the normative ideals of journalism in the digital era.