Creative Types: Sweating AI Bullets
October 30, 2025
Artists and authors are in a tizzy (and rightly so) because AI is stealing their content. AI algorithms potentially will also put them out of jobs, but the latest data from Nieman Labs explains that people are using chatbots for information seeking over content: “People Are Using ChatGPT Twice As Much As They Were Last Year. They’re Still Just As Skeptical Of AI In News.”
Usage has doubled of AI chatbots in 2024 compared to the previous years. It’s being used for tasks formerly reserved for search engines and news outlets. There is still ambivalence about the information it provides.
Here are stats about information consumption trends:
“For publishers worried about declining referral traffic, our findings paint a worrying picture, in line with other recent findings in industry and academic research. Among those who say they have seen AI answers for their searches, only a third say they “always or often” click through to the source links, while 28% say they “rarely or never” do. This suggests a significant portion of user journeys may now end on the search results page.
Contrary to some vocal criticisms of these summaries, a good chunk of population do seem to find them trustworthy. In the U.S., 49% of those who have seen them express trust in them, although it is worth pointing out that this trust is often conditional.”
When it comes to trust habits, people believe AI on low-stakes, “first pass” information or the answer is “good enough,” because AI is trained on large amounts of data. When the stakes are higher, people will do further research. There is a “comfort gap” between AI news and human oversight. Very few people implicitly trust AI. People still prefer humans curating and writing the news over a machine. They also don’t mind AI being used for assisting tasks such as editing or translation, but a human touch is still needed o the final product.
Humans are still needed as is old-fashioned information getting. The process remains the same, the tools have just changed.
Whitney Grace, October 30, 2025
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