AI in Journalism Futures 2024

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated new capabilities with such obvious and profound implications for journalism that AI-driven innovation is fast becoming the urgent focus of many newsrooms across the world. But beyond the near-term implications, we believe that AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, are likely to bring about significant and lasting structural change to information ecosystems as we know them.

The AI in Journalism Futures (AIJF) project is one of the first significant attempts to understand how AI might fundamentally reshape our information ecosystem in the long term, over the next 5 to 15 years.

In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future. By gathering the perspectives of a large and diverse number of interested, engaged, and well-informed people from across the globe, AIJF sought to broaden and deepen the conversation about AI’s potential impact on journalism and civic information around the world. It also sought to develop those perspectives beyond casual conversation and opinion by preparing participants for thoughtful discussion over several months, by applying a semi-formal scenario planning process to interactions among participants, and by structuring the outcomes of those interactions. This report represents a rough consensus of the participants as of mid-2024, obtained in possibly the most thorough and inclusive way available, about the potential long-term impact of AI on our information ecosystem.