The implementation of artificial intelligence techniques and tools in the media will systematically and continuously alter their work and that of their professionals during the coming decades. To this end, this article carries out a systematic review of the research conducted on the implementation of AI in the media over the last two decades, particularly empirical research, to identify the main social and epistemological challenges posed by its adoption. For the media, increased dependence on technological platforms and the defense of their editorial independence will be the main challenges. Journalists, in turn, are torn between the perceived threat to their jobs and the loss of their symbolic capital as intermediaries between reality and audiences, and a liberation from routine tasks that subsequently allows them to produce higher quality content. Meanwhile, audiences do not seem to perceive a great difference in the quality and credibility of automated texts, although the ease with which texts are read still favors human authorship. In short, beyond technocentric or deterministic approaches, the use of AI in a specifically human field such as journalism requires a social approach in which the appropriation of innovations by audiences and the impact it has on them is one of the keys to its development. Therefore, the study of AI in the media should focus on analyzing how it can affect individuals and journalists, how it can be used for the proper purposes of the profession and social good, and how to close the gaps that its use can cause.
Suhas Thejaswi, Juhi Kulshreshta, Lutz Oettershagencs.AI cs.CL cs.GT
Writing and communication are increasingly mediated by large language models (LLMs) that are being used to draft, revise and polish text. Although such assistance can improve clarity and help authors meet institutional expectations, widespread reliance on shared models may reduce population-level variation in linguistic form, a phenomenon we refer to as linguistic monoculture. We develop a mathematical framework in which authors and LLMs are represented as distributions over linguistic features and coevolve through repeated interaction. We analyze three interaction mechanisms: a shared model with a fixed linguistic distribution, a shared model recursively updated from author outputs, and personalized models updated through author-specific and population-level feedback. We characterize the resulting equilibria and convergence rates, showing that, shared models can drive authors toward a common norm, recursive feedback relocates the shared norm without altering pairwise spread under common conformity, and personalization can preserve a family of distinct author-model equilibria with nonzero linguistic diversity. We then endogenize conformity as a strategic choice trading off private benefits from clarity, legibility, and perceived fluency against distinctive style. Within this utility model, individually rational authors may conform more than is socially optimal because they do not internalize the value their distinctiveness provides to others, creating a negative externality and a price of monoculture that is finite for each fixed instance but can grow without bound when distinctiveness dominates authenticity. Synthetic simulations illustrate how fixed shared assistance, recursive feedback, and personalization produce different long-run diversity outcomes.