Lisbon, Jan. 5, 2026 (Lusa) - The leader and one of the authors of the Portuguese study "Impact of Generative AI on access to newspapers," Pedro Pais, told Lusa on Monday that literacy must involve explaining to people the ecosystem in which the media operates.
Lisbon-based OberCom, a research centre focused on analysing contemporary communication dynamics, has just published the study "Impact of Generative AI [artificial intelligence] on access to newspapers: Trends and analysis of news searches in Portugal".
The report aimed to analyse the impact that Generative AI [capable of generating content] - and the possibility it gives users to obtain news summaries - has on access to newspapers and online news, "having carried out research that analyses searches on AI platforms (ChatGPT and Gemini) and on the Google search engine".
Researcher Pedro Pais believes that literacy is always necessary, but "it is one of the aspects of the still scarce literature that exists on this type of phenomenon".
In the case of news summarisation, "the writing style is in fact that of a journalist, with ease, and increasingly so," says the academic.
Therefore, "in the case of summaries, we don't even go to a full news story, in the case of summaries this can be more evident: the fact that I am reading a summary of a news story and it seems to be written by a journalist," he continues.
"This has implications, particularly for the general public, not to mention political decision-makers or journalists themselves, but even from the point of view of the general public, naturally, if a news item appears to be written by a real person, there must be some way of developing this literacy," adds the researcher.
Literacy "may not necessarily be just a matter of identifying two texts and saying this one is artificial intelligence and this one is human, because there are studies that show that journalists themselves are often unable to identify the difference," he stresses, noting that "there is a lot of similarity."
"But literacy can be from the point of view of explaining to people, first of all, the type of environment and ecosystem we are involved in at the moment, that is, telling them that there is this artificial intelligence, there is this generative artificial intelligence, one that is voluntary, like ChatGPT, another that is involuntary, like AI Overview [a Google feature], which appears suddenly," he points out.
"And explaining that often this summarisation of news, this lack of access to links, can in fact have an important or relevant impact on newspapers because if people don't read newspapers", this will have an impact on advertising, for example.
Therefore, "these are important economic or financial aspects that people are often unaware of," says one of the leaders and authors of the study.
In other words, people "are unaware of the impact they have just by receiving a news summary and not going to newspapers."
This is one "form of literacy," which was already important even before the digital age, he points out.
We need to "explain the ecosystem we are involved in" because, for all these reasons, "being new is something we are constantly learning about what is happening," he concludes.
The aim of the analysis was to explore, within the Portuguese context, how the top news stories of a given day are presented in three sites: ChatGPT, Gemini and the Google search engine, the report says.
Data collection was carried out on 10 September 2025. In total, 10 users from separate accounts participated in the research, and 78 searches were carried out.
ALU/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
