Personalization driven by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has progressively permeated newswork operations, encompassing news content generation, presentation, distribution, and communicative interaction across four aspects. However, whether these innovations attract the public, and what factors count are far from settled. Utilizing cross-national data from the Digital News Report (2025) and the AI Governance International Evaluation Index (2025), this study explores the extent and key predictors of public interest in GenAI-driven journalism innovations for personalization across 34 countries worldwide (N = 54,799). Results show that public interest is moderate overall, with GenAI-driven news summaries being the most favored. At the individual level, news consumption patterns, both active news seeking and incidental news exposure, emerge as positive determinants. At the societal level, AI governance capacity matters more than AI infrastructural transparency, as it operates not only as a direct predictor but also as a contextual condition that amplifies or mitigates the effect that news use patterns have on people’s enthusiasm. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Song et al. (Fri,) studied this question.