The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report 2025, based on a large international survey, documented the early but accelerating use of AI chatbots as a source of news. It found that about 7 percent of respondents use AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini for news in a given week, a modest overall figure that rises sharply to around 15 percent among people under 25, signaling a generational shift away from search engines and traditional outlets.
The report also captured public attitudes. Audiences showed some appetite for AI features that make news more accessible, such as summarization, translation, and asking questions about a story, but remained broadly sceptical of AI in journalism and more comfortable when humans stay in the loop. Notably, when people wanted to verify whether something was true, AI chatbots ranked last among the options they trusted, reflecting awareness of AI’s tendency to fabricate facts and sources.
As one of the most widely cited annual barometers of digital news behavior, the report provides the demographic backdrop against which the BBC and EBU accuracy studies should be read: AI news use is still small but growing fastest among the young, even as trust lags well behind adoption. For a business reader, it frames the strategic stakes for publishers, who must decide how to be represented in AI products that a rising share of their future audience is starting to rely on.