AI is changing journalism, while disclosure and copyright rules remain unsettled

A review of 121 studies finds that news organizations are focusing on cooperation between people and AI, even as audiences, regulators and courts weigh its use.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

A systematic review of 121 peer-reviewed studies maps how artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used and studied in journalism from 2020 to 2026. Research output increased sharply from 2023, alongside the spread of large language models and generative AI.

The review identifies four main areas of research: automated news production, audience responses and content analysis, ethical and legal questions, and studies of implementation. Across these areas, legal and regulatory concerns were common, while copyright rules for AI-generated news remained contested between jurisdictions.

What the review found

The review covered 121 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2026. Four research areas emerged: news production and automation accounted for 38.0% of the studies; audience perception and content analysis, 24.8%; ethical and legal considerations, 19.8%; and meta-research and implementation studies, 17.4%.

Publication output accelerated sharply from 2023 onward, which the review links to the emergence of large language models and generative AI. The analysis found that effective adoption depends on redesigning newsroom workflows and combining human and machine work, rather than relying on full automation.

Audience responses to AI-generated content varied across cultural contexts. The review also found that people’s judgments can be shaped by a tendency to treat machine-produced information in particular ways, known as the machine heuristic. Legal and regulatory language appeared across all four research areas, and copyright rules for AI-generated news remained contested across jurisdictions. The researchers propose a framework linking the four areas and identify cultural context and disclosure practices as factors that may influence outcomes.

Why the findings matter

The review shows that the effects of AI in journalism are not limited to how news is produced. They also involve audience trust and interpretation, newsroom organization, disclosure practices and unresolved copyright questions. By bringing these strands together, the study identifies areas where future research can test how cultural setting and disclosure affect responses to AI-generated news.

Evidence and caveats

This systematic review analyzed 121 peer-reviewed articles published from 2020 to 2026, identified through Scopus and Web of Science. The researchers combined thematic analysis, structural topic modelling and bibliometric network analysis. Because this is a synthesis of existing studies rather than a new experiment, its conclusions depend on the coverage and methods of the studies included; the abstract does not report a formal quality assessment or details about which countries were represented.

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