What are your current views on AI in journalism?

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Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) transform our world not by the day, but by the hour. From how information is presented to how it’s consumed, newsrooms like The Texas Tribune look to navigate these changes with innovation and scrutiny. How do you, our readers, feel about our approach to AI?

Share your thoughts in our updated survey.

Last year, we partnered with 10 newsrooms and organizations, including Trusting News and the Online News Association, to evaluate reader perceptions on AI use in journalism. This year, we’re revisiting the effort. We’re interested in how your trust, expectations and understanding of AI have — or haven’t — evolved, and what questions you still have.

“People already distrust journalism altogether,” said Benjamin Toff, associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and director of the Minnesota Journalism Center. “I think newsrooms have to be very careful that they're not moving faster than their audience is.”

The feedback we received has informed careful and intentional experiments, including use of AI-assisted tools that transform stories into news quizzes, automated audio narration and Q&A chatbots. These tools never replace our journalists, but they do shape how our stories are delivered.

“We need to understand the audience's opinion on the adoption of these technologies,” said Silvia DalBen Furtado, a Ph.D candidate at The University of Texas at Austin who researches AI in journalism.

The tension between strategic adaptation and regulation shows up in numbers. A March 2025 survey of U.S. adults led by Toff and The Poynter Institute found that one in five people say publishers shouldn’t use generative AI at all, while a majority insist on clear labeling whenever it appears.

“A lot of those fears and anxieties that people have about AI are much bigger than they are about journalism,” Toff said. “We need to be at the forefront of this.”

Whether you’re excited about the possibilities of AI or wary of its risks, your feedback informs our decisions. It shapes how we use tools, how we disclose them and ultimately, how we serve you. Help us understand your thoughts in our second survey.

“Our profession has always adapted to the latest technologies,” Furtado said. “We need to have the responsibility to do that for good.”

Our newsroom uses AI-assisted tools to increase internal efficiency and improve accessibility. Here is the policy that guides our AI experimentation:

AI requires journalistic oversight.

• The Texas Tribune will not use AI to replace our journalists, who do essential, original and intensive work gathering and reporting news on politics and policy.
• We will not publish text generated by AI tools unless it has gone through a rigorous verification and editing process. And our journalists will not use information from generative tools as a primary source of information.
• Journalists will disclose to their editors if they used tools such as ChatGPT in the reporting process. They will be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI tools, including how AI introduces uncertainty about where information comes from. They will disclose how they independently confirmed any information they learned by using AI tools.

Cautious experimentation with AI tools is encouraged in the newsroom.

• Tribune journalists may experiment with AI tools for tasks such as data analysis, transcription, headline/SEO and social platform writing, but they must be critical of the tools. They will treat AI-generated output as unverified information and work to independently verify it.
• Journalists will avoid putting confidential information such as anonymous source names or privately obtained documents into third-party AI tools.

We will disclose how we use AI.

• When AI tools play a role in developing key findings in a story, such as through a data analysis, we will clearly disclose how the tools were used.
• If we build journalism products that rely on AI tools to generate published information for readers, such as a chatbot or interactive module, we will disclose the usage of these tools and add context to clarify the role of AI in the product.

We will not use AI to generate images for news stories.

• We do not alter any elements of photos, video or audio. This means we do not publish news photographs created by or manipulated by generative AI. In cases where AI-generated images are the newsworthy subject of a story, we will clearly label them as such with a watermark and caption.

Our journalism is not always AI source material.

• The Tribune may selectively block some AI technologies from “scraping” the Tribune website to add training data for their models. We will review these tools on a case-by-case basis to determine the benefits and drawbacks of preventing these agents from using our journalism in their products.

AI tools may be used for production of non-journalistic content.

• Tribune staff on the marketing, communications, product, revenue, operations and other non-editorial teams are encouraged to experiment with AI tools for tasks such as copywriting assistance, automation of workflows and business efficiency.
• Before utilizing a new AI tool, individuals should openly discuss and disclose their usage with their manager. And everyone should have a close eye on the security and accuracy of information.

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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