Pedro Pais, leader and one of the authors of the Portuguese study “The Impact of Generative AI on Access to Newspapers”, told Lusa on Monday that literacy must include explaining to people the ecosystem in which media operates.
Lisbon-based OberCom, a research center focused on the analysis of modern communication dynamics, has published a study titled “The Impact of Generative AI.” [artificial intelligence] On Access to Newspapers: Trends and Analysis of News Search in Portugal”.
This report aims to analyze the impact of Generative AI. [capable of generating content] – and the possibility for users to obtain news summaries – can access newspapers and online news, and “conducted a study analyzing searches on AI platforms (ChatGPT and Gemini) and the Google search engine.”
Researcher Pedro Pais believes that literacy is always needed, but “that's one aspect of the lack of literature on this type of phenomenon.''
In the case of news summaries, the scholar says, “the writing style is indeed journalistic, and is becoming more and more so.”
So, “with summaries, you don't even go through the entire news article. With summaries, this is more obvious: the fact that I'm reading a summary of a news article and it looks like it was written by a journalist,” he continues.
“This has particular implications for the general public, not to mention political decision-makers and journalists themselves. But from the general public's perspective, of course, if news items appear to have been written by real people, there must be some way to cultivate this literacy,” the researchers added.
Literacy “may not be just a matter of identifying two texts and saying this is artificial intelligence and this is human, because there is research showing that journalists themselves are often unable to tell the difference,” he stressed, noting that “there are many similarities.”
“But literacy is, first of all, in terms of explaining to people the kinds of environments and ecosystems that we're currently involved in, so telling people that there's this artificial intelligence, there's this generative artificial intelligence, and one is voluntary, like ChatGPT, and the other is involuntary, like AI. [a Google feature]it comes out of nowhere,” he points out.
“And we explain how the lack of access to news summaries and links can actually have an important or relevant impact on newspapers, because if people don't read newspapers, this affects advertising, for example.”
Therefore, “these are important economic or financial aspects that people are often unaware of,” says one of the study's leaders and authors.
In other words, people “are unaware of the impact they are having by only receiving news summaries and not going to the newspaper.”
He points out that this is a form of “literacy” and was already important before the digital age.
For all of these reasons, he concludes, we need to “account for the ecosystems we're involved in,” because “what's new is that we're always learning about what's going on.”
The purpose of the analysis was to examine how the top news stories of a given day are displayed on three sites – ChatGPT, Gemini and the Google search engine – in the Portuguese context, the report said.
Data collection was performed on September 10, 2025. A total of 10 users from different accounts participated in the study and 78 searches were performed.
