An Italian newspaper has created the world’s first fully AI-generated daily newspaper as part of a month-long journalistic experiment intended to illustrate the impact of artificial intelligence on work and daily life, reports the Guardian.
Readers of Il Foglio, an Italian daily newspaper with nationwide circulation, discovered a unique addition to the Tuesday edition: the four-page Il Foglio AI. “It will be the first daily newspaper in the world on newsstands created entirely using artificial intelligence,” Il Foglio editor Claudio Cerasa told the UK publication. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony.”
Journalists still have a small role in the process, asking questions of the AI tool and reading the answers. Cerasa emphasises that it still reflects “a real newspaper” and was the product of “news, debate and provocation”. “It is just another [Il] Foglio made with intelligence, don’t call it artificial,” he said.
Il Fogolio is not, however, the first publication to go all AI. The Swedish free monthly magazine, Nöjesguiden, published an entirely AI-generated issue last July as a piece of satire, “a jab at the newspaper’s management” to remind them “this is what happens when you don’t get money [for freelance writers],” editor-in-chief Frasse Levinsson told SVT.
[See more: A Polish radio station has come under fire for replacing all its human hosts with AI]
The Guardian reviewed the short Il Foglio AI insert, noting articles on Italian support for US President Donald Trump, the “10 betrayals” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a “rare upbeat story about the Italian economy” and an exploration of ‘situationships’ and the trend of young Europeans foregoing steady relationships. Their assessment that the “articles were structured, straightforward and clear, with no obvious grammatical errors” seems to damn with faint praise.
The final page of the insert is a series of “letters from readers to the editor” – all entirely AI-generated – that included a question about whether the technology will render humans “useless” in the future. The response jokes about the shortcomings of AI, saying it doesn’t know how to order coffee “without getting the sugar wrong,” but there are genuine issues with using AI in journalism.
Generative AI excels at giving the appearance of clear, authoritative writing, but as Gizmodo points out, “they are ultimately glorified autocomplete systems and face the intractable problem of simply making things up.” That presents a real risk to newsrooms already struggling with credibility issues in an increasingly polarised environment.
While some uses of AI appear to be working as intended, such as AI-generated article summaries on pieces from the Washington Post and Bloomberg, others have gone poorly. The Los Angeles Times, for example, rolled out an AI-power tool meant to rate the bias of opinion articles and generate counterpoints – then quickly axed it when it was found downplaying the KKK.
