The voice is perfect, the tone impeccable. Forbes Italia’s new news anchor doesn’t miss a beat, but there’s one detail: it doesn’t exist. It’s a digital avatar generated by artificial intelligence.
While Forbes launches the first news broadcast created entirely with AI, Il Foglio publishes a whole issue produced by algorithms.
AI has entered newsrooms as traditional publishing faces declining print sales, reduced advertising, and fragmented audience attention. In this landscape, AI appears both as a resource and a potential threat.
Everything hinges on the quality of the initial prompt. Guiding AI has become a key skill called prompt engineering: the art of writing clear instructions to direct language models.
“The human contribution isn’t sacrificed,” assures Eugenio Azzinnari from Cogit AI, which collaborated with Forbes Italia. “These tools can work alongside journalists, not replace them.” Azzinnari highlights flexibility as AI’s strength: creating content with less time and money.
In their case, professional journalists publish news on the website, while AI handles video presentation.
Alessandro Rossi, Forbes’ director, explains their process: “An editor selects and rewrites news, creates a podcast, then Eugenio produces an avatar ‘reporter.'”
Forbes represents a “centaur” model—half human, half machine—where editorial intelligence stays in human hands. This approach uses a human-in-the-loop system, with human oversight ensuring quality and accuracy.
Il Foglio took a different approach, true to the newspaper’s intellectual nature. With Il Foglio AI, artificial intelligence becomes a co-author rather than just a tool.
The newsroom reports the challenge wasn’t merely technical but conceptual: “Getting the machine to write in a style beyond its natural ‘neutral’ tone was complex. It required extensive dialogue and adjustments.”
The seeming clarity of AI-generated texts creates a paradox: the writing flows smoothly with perfect form, but this stylistic perfection can create an illusion of objectivity. Readers might lower their critical guard because “everything sounds good.” AI doesn’t reason—it simulates coherence, offering answers that seem credible before being true. In journalism, this poses serious risks.
Azzinnari notes that “these technologies are still developing but will improve: soon the output will be almost indistinguishable from human work.” Yet he acknowledges that AI “generates controversy and unease. People fear it will take their jobs and skills.”
The real danger is journalism increasingly confined to newsrooms, distant from reality, while trust between media and public reaches historic lows. “Without even making phone calls, there’s no verification. That’s how fake news spreads.”
For Il Foglio’s team, “writing can be automated, but not ideas. A journalist’s work must go beyond reporting facts to developing critical thinking that questions those very facts.”
Perhaps the question isn’t whether a journalist using AI remains a journalist, but whether AI, without the journalist, can truly tell the world’s story.
