For decades, newsrooms have found themselves in varying states of crisis as much-hyped technologies emerged, again and again, threatening to upend their business models. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most recent dilemma confronting the news industry, particularly following the public research release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in December 2022. A few outlets like BuzzFeed, News Corps Australia, and G/O Media quickly moved to incorporate generative AI into their content production.

The sustainability of news cannot fall on publishers alone; large digital platforms must share responsibility to understand and address their sizable impacts on society. Yet search engine and social media companies operate with relatively few U.S. legal requirements to build fairness and transparency into algorithms, protect sensitive personal information when serving personalised advertisements, engage in ad-tech practices that promote fair competition with news publishers, and mitigate the spread of harmful content online. Without bright-line U.S. regulations for technology companies, the recent acceleration in AI adoption presents at least four major risks that could severely undermine both news availability and public access to information in the long term.