Can AI Become Walter Cronkite? Testing the Machine Heuristic, the Hostile Media Effect, and Political News Written by Artificial Intelligence

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) in news writing are ushering in significant changes in journalism. This study examined how the nature of a story's author (human or news bot journalist) affects how audiences assess a news story and its writer. Applying a Relative Hostile Media perspective, an experiment examined the effect of the ideological distance between news outlets and audiences. Results reveal that people express more positive attitudes—and trust—toward human journalists than toward AI journalists, but they perceive the latter as less biased. Also, story and outlet credibility have a negative relationship with ideological distance from outlets.