How AI Is Rewriting the Future of Journalism

Chatbots, Trust, and Truth in the AI Age

It seems like the journalism industry cannot catch a break. The internet dismantled the business models that sustained it for a century. Social media allowed advertisers to reach audiences directly, while the creator economy rewired who gets to tell stories in the first place. Our attention scattered across Netflix, dating apps, and every other platform competing for our time, all against a backdrop of declining trust in institutions, including journalism. And it’s important to be honest that trust didn’t erode for technological reasons alone. Perceived bias and reporting missteps had already shaken confidence in the industry. Moreover, the industry was slow to adapt to the realities of the internet.

And then, in the middle of the night, AI companies scraped the internet and taught chatbots how to write like the very journalists they would soon be competing against

Where We Are Today

About 800 million people use ChatGPT every week (and that’s just one chatbot, there are several other leading platforms). While the most common use case is companionship (we’ll save that crisis for another article), people are increasingly turning to these chatbots to understand the world around them. “Where do things stand with the war in Ukraine?” “Is the economy improving?”

You can see the world we’re moving toward (rapidly!). Instead of opening your browser or email and searching for the latest article on foreign policy, pop culture, or the state of the economy, you’ll orally ask your personalized chatbot for a brief summary. This won’t be everyone’s path to learning about the world, many still and will continue to read print magazines (if they survive) or full stories from hardworking journalists. But just as social media changed how billions of people got their “news” and who got to “create” information, one needs very little foresight to see the world AI chatbots will create.

Depending on the chatbot, your well-written, 1-2 paragraph customized response—fitted to your communication style—may or may not source factual, human-written stories. Even if the chatbot does pulls accurate information from accredited journalism or databases, it may not cite where the information came from, bypassing the work of whoever reported it.

The Existential Threat

I chatted with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and former Editor-in-Chief of Wired, for the latest episode of I’ve Got Questions. AI is “unquestionably the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat” to media, one that could potentially “obliterate the entire media industry,” he told me.

He identifies two existential disruptions:

First, the chatbot replaces the web: When people ask their AI assistant “tell me about what’s happening in foreign policy” instead of visiting TheAtlantic.com, media companies lose their direct relationship with audiences, along with the advertising and subscription models built upon it. AI chatbots answer queries by scraping publisher content without providing credit, links, or revenue. This is compounded by what Thompson calls an “infinite number of fake news publications” that AI can generate, flooding the zone with synthetic content competing with real journalism.

Second, the end of advertising as we know it: AI enables hyper-personalized ads generated on the fly, imagine an ad tailored specifically to you because the system knows you’re exhausted from a red-eye flight. Traditional media can’t compete in that game.

Where Journalism Still Wins

Now it’s easy to conclude that journalism doesn’t stand a chance in this new environment. But I’m not so sure that’s true. In fact, I think there is a world in which the core pillars of journalism grow in the AI era, albeit unrecognizably.

The reality is, journalism isn’t “writing,” writing is just the medium. Journalism is high-integrity information gathering, fact-checking, and verification. What a chatbot fundamentally lacks is trust and accuracy. And trust and accuracy are what journalism can provide.

You could imagine a future where, say, you ask for the latest news on foreign policy, and the answer you receive from your chatbot is powered by The Atlantic or The Economist (or take your publication/ journalist of choice). A journalist on the other end loads their reporting (in whatever format suits them: writing, video, a stack of relevant files), and AI chatbots pull from that data but convey it in a format that suits you, the recipient. Your stories could arrive as two-minute audio summaries, 30-second videos, or traditional articles, whatever you prefer. When AI-powered, that kind of versatility becomes possible.

We don’t lose the facts or accuracy, we just receive the story in the context of the new general purpose technology. I, for one, would feel significantly better about my AI-generated briefing if I had those guarantees, knowing the underlying sources are vetted institutions I trust, not an opaque mix of scraped content and synthetic nonsense.

It’s actually in AI companies’ best interest to make this happen. Not all AI companies will compete on this metric, but for companies competing to be our go-to AI assistant, it’s a competitive advantage to have accurate information. Their products are better when powered by good, fact-checked information from trusted sources. Thompson confirmed this in our conversation: companies like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have an incentive to ground their chatbots in factual journalism.

The Unresolved Questions

Of course this isn’t the solution to saving journalism in the AI age. It could crowd out independent journalists and regional publications that lack a media giant’s brand power and negotiating leverage. It could lead to more solidified echo chambers and epistemic fragmentation. It could radically change the incentives for journalists. I’m just illustrating an example where you can see glimpses of a business model that could be plausible.

The real question is: how unrecognizable is traditional media willing to become?

But beyond the scope of traditional media, the nature of trust and reporting is already transforming. We’re seeing independent journalists, economists, scientists, and pop culture reporters build out their own media-of-one enterprises—consisting of Substacks and podcasts and YouTube channels with direct access to the communities they create, in innovative formats that work for the expert at hand. I subscribe to traditional media publications, but I also subscribe to newsletters of economists, technologists, and historians whom I really trust and appreciate for their deep expertise. Trust as a signal is changing. And as AI gives independent contributors more leverage, it becomes easier for a solo scientist, journalist, or economist to scale and reach audience sizes once reserved for traditional media powerhouses.

What’s at Stake

Social media has already shaken democracy to its core. We are drowning in information. We’ve retreated into polarized tribalism. We unknowingly take advice about voting and pandemics from Russian troll farms, and now we float through AI-generated realities. (I’ve written before about the post-reality era we could be stepping into, where AI generates a personalized reality for each of us, and we decide what’s real based on vibes rather than facts).

But a country needs factual information that holds power to account. Democracy only works when citizens can make informed choices and leaders know they will be scrutinized and constrained by truth.

The journalism industry has survived radio and television. It has hung on through the internet and social media. This time around, it’s quite possible that the technological disruption is one that actually aligns journalism’s core value proposition with the technology of distribution.

The difference will be whether media institutions are willing to evolve as radically as the moment demands.

Watch my full interview with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, on IGQ here. We also cover his extraordinary new book, The Running Room.