AI & Journalism: Who Controls the Narrative

Propaganda once required a state budget and a printing press. It now requires a prompt. Synthetic video, fabricated atrocity footage and coordinated inauthentic accounts move faster than any newsroom can verify, and the mere existence of deepfakes lets authentic evidence be dismissed as fake. Meanwhile answer engines summarize a war for millions without sending a reader to the outlet that paid to report it, and a handful of model companies inherit the position of default narrator. Those companies are not neutral. When a model trained largely on Western media becomes the world's summarizer of Gaza, Sudan or Kashmir, editorial judgment moves from accountable institutions to opaque corporate incentive.

Who this is for

Journalists, creators, researchers, and anyone whose community's story is being told by someone else's model.

On the table

• What do journalists still do that no system can replace?
• Who is left to hold power to account when the intermediary is owned by the powerful?
• How do training data, safety tuning and content deals quietly decide which framings count as reasonable?

You'll leave with

• How an investigative reporter and a mobile-first publisher verify in a world of synthetic evidence
• Where the economics of verification are collapsing, and what replaces them
• What an independent record of our communities needs in order to survive