AI in Everyday Media: Prof. Sonja Utz Discusses Psychological Processes

The 12th edition of the Media Day took place on 16 November 2023 and was jointly organised by the Department of Media, Society and Communication at the University of Innsbruck, the Austria Press Agency (APA), the Tiroler Tageszeitung and the ORF. The focus of the event was "AI in Everyday Media".

Credibility is judged differently 

In her keynote, Prof. Sonja Utz, head of the IWM Everyday Media lab, looked at the psychological aspects of interacting with AI. In this context, she also addressed the credibility of AI-powered voice assistants. Utz and her team explored how devices like Alexa affect the way we search for and evaluate information. Their findings showed that people generally place more trust in spoken words from voice assistants and text generated by ChatGPT than in information from Wikipedia, even when the content is identical. According to Utz, "It's not just that ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates and provides inaccurate facts; our studies suggest that the format of presentation (in a dialogue) also affects the credibility of the information."

Panel brings together media professionals and AI-experts
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During the final panel discussion, the psychologist debated with, among others, the deputy editor-in-chief of the APA, Katharina Schell, and the editor-in-chief of the Tiroler Tageszeitung, Matthias Krapf. The media professionals shared their experiences of AI's supporting role in newsrooms, such as transcribing interviews, and explained that their AI policies prioritise values such as human autonomy and fairness. However, Sonja Utz argued that generative models have a limited role in news production anyway, as they generate text based on probabilities, lack real-time knowledge, and do not conduct background research or interviews. She suggested exploring the grey area where journalists use AI to generate arguments for and against a given issue.

The role of the media is central

A prominent theme of the panel discussion was the critical role of education in navigating AI. Participants stressed the need to quickly grasp the basics of AI, particularly in the context of journalistic coverage of these issues. Maya Pindeus, CEO of Humanising Autonomy, an AI startup, emphasised that the media should play a central role in communicating values and ethical standards in the field of AI.