Artificial intelligence in the press: comparative study and exploration of news with ChatGPT in a traditional and a digital native media

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, journalism cannot remain oblivious to the innovations brought about by the socio -technological reality. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the technologies on the rise, although the Spanish media have incorporated it little, experimentally and in specific sections. This research has two objectives: 1) to know the state of development of AI in the Spanish digital media and the industry's perception of the impact of this technology on the profession; 2) to explore a human vs synthetic text generation detection method to assess whether generative AI is being used in media. A comparative study was carried out between two media of reference in Spain, one matrix and conservative ideology (El Mundo), and another digital native and progressive trend (eldiario.es). The methodology was based on methodological triangulation and included a survey and an experiment with ChatGPT to detect whether a sample of texts published in these two media was created by humans or machines. The results diagnose that none of these newspapers apply AI, although they are designing plans to do so, and that there seems to be a lack of AI experts in the newsrooms, although a significantly higher predisposition towards AI in the native media is not confirmed as opposed to the matrix. The analyses carried out confirm that generative AI is not used to create texts. The method applied can be used in other studies because its validity is confirmed to provide clues about the human or artificial origin of journalistic texts.