Recent advances in autonomous digital agents from industry (e.g., Manus AI and Gemini's research mode) highlight potential for structured tasks by autonomous decision-making and task decomposition; however, it remains unclear to what extent the agent-based systems can improve multimodal web data productivity. We study this in the realm of journalism, which requires iterative planning, interpretation, and contextual reasoning from multimodal raw contents to form a well structured news. We introduce NEWSAGENT, a benchmark for evaluating how agents can automatically search available raw contents, select desired information, and edit and rephrase to form a news article by accessing core journalistic functions. Given a writing instruction and firsthand data as how a journalist initiates a news draft, agents are tasked to identify narrative perspectives, issue keyword-based queries, retrieve historical background, and generate complete articles. Unlike typical summarization or retrieval tasks, essential context is not directly available and must be actively discovered, reflecting the information gaps faced in real-world news writing. NEWSAGENT includes 6k human-verified examples derived from real news, with multimodal contents converted to text for broad model compatibility. We evaluate open- and closed-sourced LLMs with commonly-used agentic frameworks on NEWSAGENT, which shows that agents are capable of retrieving relevant facts but struggling with planning and narrative integration. We believe that NEWSAGENT serves a realistic testbed for iterating and evaluating agent capabilities in terms of multimodal web data manipulation to real-world productivity.

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a critical issue in recent years, requiring significant efforts to detect it. However, the existing fake news detection datasets are sourced from human journalists, which are likely to have inherent bias limitations due to the highly subjective nature of this task. In this paper, we revisit the existing fake news dataset verified by human journalists with augmented fact-checking by large language models (ChatGPT), and we name the augmented fake news dataset ChatGPT-FC. We quantitatively analyze the distinctions and resemblances between human journalists and LLM in assessing news subject credibility, news creator credibility, time-sensitive, and political framing. Our findings highlight LLM's potential to serve as a preliminary screening method, offering a promising avenue to mitigate the inherent biases of human journalists and enhance fake news detection.

Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel weighs in on how artificial intelligence can change the patient-doctor relationship on'America's Newsroom.' A St. Louis newspaper decided to take on the artificial intelligence debate by allowing a robot to pen an op-ed arguing against the use of AI in journalism. The article, featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was written entirely by Microsoft's Bing Chat AI program, according to a disclaimer in the article. The bot was instructed to "write a newspaper editorial arguing that artificial intelligence should not be used in journalism." The paper then let the AI platform take over from there.

Although artificial intelligence has a growing role in journalism, research finds that Americans don’t know about AI’s role in their lives—or their news. Technology has repeatedly transformed the news media industry—telegraph, radio, television, and then the internet. Yet despite these evolutions, technology remained the medium and human journalists the messengers. The introduction of AI has changed that model. Today, AI machines designed to perform the communicator role are generating news content independent of humans. That means AI is the medium and the messenger, giving human journalists a new synthetic partner programmed to aid in news gathering. The new study finds many Americans are…

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Although artificial intelligence has a growing role in journalism, research finds that Americans don't know about AI's role in their lives--or their news. Technology has repeatedly transformed the news media industry--telegraph, radio, television, and then the internet. Yet despite these evolutions, technology remained the medium and human journalists the messengers. The introduction of AI has changed that model.

Have you come across a robojournalist? Robojournalism is an awesome way to produce reports on repetitive events available to people and at the same time letting human journalists focus on work that requires research and human insight. One example of such system is Quakebot by LA Times. However, I found it surprisingly hard to find examples where usage of robojournalism is clearly stated. In robojournalism, or automated journalism, some data is transformed into news reports written in some human language.

News stories are created by computer programs in automated journalism, also known as algorithmic journalism or robot journalism. Stories are generated automatically by computers rather than by human reporters thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These programs analyze, organize, and present data in a form that is understandable to humans. Typically, an algorithm examines huge quantities of given data, chooses from a variety of pre-programmed article formats, organizes important points, and inserts information like names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other numbers. The output may be tailored to a specific voice, tone, or style.

For many of us the term "artificial intelligence" still belongs in the realms of science-fiction and brings to mind the domineering Skynet in the Terminator films or the malevolent Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A recent Press Gazette poll asking readers if they think AI robots are a threat to journalism or an opportunity found the majority (69%) of more than 1,200 voters saw AI as a threat. But while what's known as "artificial general intelligence" – machines akin or superior to human intelligence – does not yet exist and may never be fully realised, AI tools are already in use in the news industry today. These tools help in the gathering, production and distribution of information. They fall broadly under the definition of "machine learning", which is a subset of AI, where computers handle specific tasks and are able to learn and improve as they go, independent of human help.

While Artificial Intelligence, AI, is making inroads into journalism, human journalists will not be replaced by robots. AI will mainly be used to assist humans in adapting to the latest technology trends to better suit the needs of new age media, said an expert. Lisa Gibbs, Director of News Partnerships of The Associated Press, was addressing the audience at the 17th edition of the Arab Media Forum being held at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai. Speaking about the role of'Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Press', Gibbs noted that Artificial Intelligence in newsrooms will enable it to scale up content, automate certain types of stories and authenticate and fact check leads that emerge out of social media. Urging media organisations to invest more towards developing algorithms that can help machines learn to perform certain automated tasks, she said, using the full potential of technology will allow its journalists to dedicate time for developing relevant and meaningful personalised content that resonates with readers.

Indian-American brothers look to harness artificial intelligence for greater good Google launching artificial intelligence research center in China DUBAI: With the everchanging technological landscape the world is witnessing, Artificial Intelligence's impact on the world of journalism has proved to be a double-edged sword, the Associated Press' Director of News Partnerships Lisa Gibbs explained at Dubai's Arab Media Forum on Tuesday. "The biggest issue we face today is the war on fake news. AI will be a powerful tool for those seeking to create it and those seeking to combat it," she said, adding that, "technology is getting better at creating fake images and thus we need to build tools to spot these fake images, the same goes for text and video." The rise of fake news across social media platforms pushed the Associated Press to launch a tool called "AP Verify" which allows AI to assess and verify news extracted from social media, Gibbs explained. With this, AI is being introduced to more speedily form news stories based on verified minimal information supplied – thus churning out 3,700 stories a day in comparison to the 300 done solely using human journalists.