The perception of trust in personalized video news generated by artificial intelligence

Abstract

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) grows, so do the questions regarding this new technology and its potential uses. Among the various possibilities and employment that could be offered by AI is personalized news technology. Nowadays, it is already possible to produce journalistic content through AI (Carlson, 2014; Graefe & Haim, 2018). Digital storytelling has become a reality through automated journalism powered by AI (Caswell & Dörr, 2018; Galily, 2018; Linden, 2017; Thorne, 2020). “Artificial intelligence applies advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning, to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions” (Gartner Group, 2019). In personalized news technology, algorithms are responsible for selecting content and sorting it according to the personalization criteria (Powers, 2017). So far, AI has been studied in different fields with distinct research focuses (Loureiro et al., 2021). Studies of news- personalization technologies have mainly focused on research engines and filtering mechanisms (Darvishy et al., 2020; Haim et al., 2017; Manoharan & Senthilkumar, 2020). Few studies examine news aggregators (Haim et al., 2018; Kwak et al., 2021) and the effects of news personalization on audiences (Merten, 2021; Swart, 2021; Thurman et al., 2019), thus demanding further research. AI is an imminent reality for the future, reshaping the news media (Brennen et al., 2022; Linden, 2017; Thorne, 2020). Hence, it is still necessary to investigate the impacts that this technology potentially offers to users. Therefore, the current study seeks to respond to this need to deepen research into the area of news personalization through AI, by analyzing the response of audiences toward current and future technological tendencies. The main aim of this research is to investigate the levels of trust that users have in AI-generated personalized video news.