Automated News Reading in the Neural Age: Audience Reception and Perceived Credibility of a News Broadcast Read By a Neural Voice

Abstract

Automated journalism is rapidly developing in the news industry. Among the most recent and promising technological potentials are neural voices, i.e. text-to-speech technology powered by neural networks. Based on a reception analysis with in-depth qualitative interviews (N =12), this study explores how Danish radio listeners receive a full news broadcast read by a neural voice and perceive the credibility of the neural reader and the news content. Results show that the participants divide into two types: the perspicacious listeners who realize or suspect that the news reading is artificially synthesized and, to some degree, are annoyed by it, and the oblivious listeners who believe the news is read by a human and are predominantly positive towards it. Participants from both groups pay particular attention to voice emotionality when evaluating the appropriateness of the neural news reader. Also, they tend to attribute human characteristics to the neural news reader.The participants single out the news messages as well as the media organization behind the news broadcast, rather than the neural voice itself as critical components constituting credibility. 2Transparency is of great importance when applying a neural voice in a news broadcast, since it is a prerequisite for credibility.

AI voices reduce cognitive activity? A psychophysiological study of the media effect of AI and human newscasts in Chinese journalism

“…For instance, the Neurojour project (Heiselberg, 2021) is an innovative pilot project within the field of journalism research that tests psychophysiological measures. In a separate study, participants in both groups (neural voices: textto-speech technology supported by neural networks; and human reporter voices) evaluated "neural news" with particular attention to voice emotion (Heiselberg et al, 2022). And in Heiselberg (2021)'s article, they expressed concern that as AI broadcasts get closer to humans, "The Uncanny Valley" (see Mori et al, 2012) could occur, which is consistent with Clark et al's (2021) earlier research.…”

“…In other words, Zheng et al 's (2018) experiments revealed that neutral news written or broadcast by AI elicited the same response from audiences as news written or broadcast by human journalists. There are also academics who employ qualitative research techniques (Heiselberg et al, 2022). On the basis of in-depth qualitative interviews, their reception analysis (n = 12) investigated how Danish radio listeners perceive the credibility and news content of neural readers when they hear complete news broadcasts through neural voices.…”

“…We expect that because AI synthesized voices in current AI technology are still unable to effectively handle special cases of accented rhythm, alliteration, and Chinese Pronunciation Erhua in its contexts, human voices may have more syllable and accent processing shifts than AI-synthesized voices, thereby expressing more emotion and cueing and eliciting stronger cognitive-emotional feedback from listeners, as reflected in this study primarily in in brainwave activity. Given that there have been articles using psychophysiological methods to study AI newscast (Bucher and Schumacher, 2006;Kallinen and Ravaja, 2007;Seleznov et al, 2019;Heiselberg, 2021;Heiselberg et al, 2022), our first research hypothesis is that human-voiced news broadcasts induce greater EEG activity and cognitive activation in listeners than AI-synthesized voices, and consequently have greater cognitive communication effects (Hypothesis 1).…”

“…The study includes a pre-experiment session and a formal experiment session. The pre-experiment was a within-subject design with the attempt of replicating previous studies (Waddell, 2018;Heiselberg et al, 2022) that found news attributed to a machine newscaster was perceived as less credible than news attributed to a human newscaster, even though the news was read by AI voices.…”

Editorial: Neurocognitive features of human-robot and human-machine interaction

“…Today, AI is also extensively adopted in automated journalism for writing and broadcasting (Heiselberg et al, 2022 ). Yet, there has been limited systematic research on the variances in brain activation between human and artificial voices during newscasts.…”