Ask a Large Language Model AI (LLM) like ChatGPT to randomly choose a number between 1 and 10, and it will choose 7.

So will between 25-45% of English speakers. That’s a big bias, but it’s nowhere near that of your typical LLM. I was at a conference recently where the presenter (Sprinboard.ai’s Pip Bingemann at Humain) asked everyone to get their phones out and pose the random number question to the AI in their pockets. He said “stand up if you got a seven”. Almost every person there, over 100, stood up.

The LLM in this case is just doing its job: predicting “what comes next” in a well-formed sentence. It is not a thinking machine. It is a consensus machine. That makes it wonderful at grammar and composing flowing sentences that feel right. In the context of news journalism, being a consensus machine is dangerous.

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The University of Canberra’s Digital News Report 2025 examines AI and news in two distinct areas: the use of LLMs to surface and consume news, and the use of AI to produce news. There may be a future where these two areas of consumption and production merge, but we’re not there yet. For now, there are people and organisations who still make news, distinct from the people who consume it.

The use of AI as a news interface – to distribute news for consumption – is limited. The report shows that........

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