AI Chatbots Undermine Journalism's Trust Foundations

Journalism professor Felix Simon tested seven leading chatbots, including ChatGPT and Bard, over a month and found frequent fabrications and factual errors when summarizing current events. Corroborating reports from Columbia Journalism Review, Digital Trends, and Reuters identify training-data biases, platform dependency, and traffic losses from AI-synthesized answers. Newsrooms are adopting hybrid verification workflows and pivoting toward original, audience-driven content to counter accuracy and revenue risks.