AI in the Newsroom: How Presentation of AI Anchor and Viewers’ Familiarity with AI Shape Perceptions of AI Anchor

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to integrate into journalism, understanding audience perceptions on such changes becomes increasingly important. With an online experiment (N = 386), this study investigated the influence of an AI news anchor’s visual presentation on perceived human-likeness and its subsequent association with perceptions of the AI news anchor and news quality. Our findings revealed a significant moderation in this association based on participants’ familiarity with AI. For those with low AI familiarity, augmented visual cues of the AI news anchor led to heightened perception of human-likeness. This heightened perception, in turn, positively influenced their views of the AI anchor’s credibility, likability, and the overall quality of the news delivered. The study underscores the role of visual cues and AI familiarity in shaping public reactions to AI-mediated journalism and offers insights for the design and presentation of AI news anchors to different audience segments.