People are becoming more relaxed about AI news. They have no idea.
This analysis by Mumbrella’s editorial director Hal Crawford was first published in the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report 2025 as the commentary for the chapter ‘AI and News’.
Ask a Large Language Model AI (LLM) like ChatGPT to randomly choose a number between 1 and 10, and it will choose 7.
So will between 25-45% of English speakers. That’s a big bias, but it’s nowhere near that of your typical LLM. I was at a conference recently where the presenter (Sprinboard.ai’s Pip Bingemann at Humain) asked everyone to get their phones out and pose the random number question to the AI in their pockets. He said “stand up if you got a seven”. Almost every person there, over 200, stood up.
The LLM in this case is just doing its job: predicting “what comes next” in a well-formed sentence. It is not a thinking machine. It is a consensus machine. That makes it wonderful at grammar and composing flowing sentences that feel right. In the context of news journalism, being a consensus machine is dangerous.
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