The Dawn of AI: Will it lead to the death of journalism?

In this new age, AI is slowly being integrated into every field possible. Join Arjun Mistry in exploring the effect of using such technology in journalism – and whether it’ll be the death, or a new revival, of the field.

Newsrooms across the country echo with rapid keyboard clacks and the printing and publishing of thousands of genuine, human stories each day. The sounds of excited chatter and rushed footsteps fill the high-velocity environment with every single writer crunching down each letter to reach a wordcount before deadline.

Journalism is not just about finding out the truth, it’s about putting power back into the hands of the people through on-the-ground, authentic reporting. But what happens when AI begins to be incorporated into the field? Alex Connock, an AI, Media and Marketing lecturer at Oxford University said: “AI is creating deepfakes of all kinds, which are fundamentally challenging the nature of truth.”

Recently, there has been a rise in the amount of fake, AI-generated experts. For example, a NewsGuard report in September 2025 found that leading generative AI chatbots spread incorrect claims when prompted with questions regarding controversial news topics 35% of the time, which raises the question: how can the public continue to trust information anymore? Connock goes on to say: “If audiences can’t tell the real from the synthetic, the scarce and valuable thing becomes trusted verification – and that is journalism’s oldest job, not a new one.”

As journalists, it’s our responsibility to be as transparent as possible regarding how we source information, and how we present that to the general public. This requires a level of sensitivity that a machine just cannot replicate. Using AI to create information destroys the entire purpose of journalism itself as well as removing human elements from real stories.

Charlie Beckett, head of Journalism AI at London School of Economics said: “With misinformation, it’s important to remember somebody’s got to press the button. The advantage with journalism is that you can check your sources… Most of the misinformation is deliberate.”

As a result, it is not up to the reader to fact check their information, it is up to the journalists themselves. Misinformation has always and will always exist in a world where technology is integrated into every aspect of life. Beckett goes on to say: “The assumption that somehow you can give people perfect information, and they’ll make rational choices… even if that were possible, it would be a very strange world to live in.”

Traditionally, journalism is often dictated by on-the-ground reporting skills and genuine human connection. AI services, however, also offer several opportunities for the field. Beckett said: “It’s really useful to find stories and search databases. It can help you edit quicker, add text to video and reformat. AI can also help you automate systems, for example, paywalls.”

However, what does this mean for the skills learnt by journalists through reporting? Beckett goes on to say: “That is the kind of journalism that is going to be more valued going forward; critical thinking, being sceptical and intelligent, and actually having real conversations with people.”

Going forward in an age of AI, some may argue that the real danger isn’t AI choosing stories or reducing the craft of journalism, it is the newsrooms outsourcing judgement and forgetting the value was never in the choosing. Connock said: “Reporting is a craft you keep only by doing it… So protect it on purpose: treat original, on the ground work as the thing the machine can’t replicate and let AI take the desk work it’s good at.”

AI in journalism, whether we like it or not, is inevitable. When it comes to AI generated misinformation, how do we ensure that our audiences are getting the correct information? Jonathan Bostock, spokesperson for the campaign Pause AI, said: “You need a way of coordinating and working together as a field. You need some way of setting standards. There’s very little regulation in the UK about the usage of AI.”

Bostock further explained: “You need to decide in which ways AI is acceptable and which ways it isn’t. You need a way to enforce violations of whatever regulation there is, and you need a way to verify that violations are not occurring.” It is up to us, as journalists, to ensure that the information we are receiving is from authentic, verified sources.

When it comes to deciding whether AI is going to revive, or lead to the ‘death’ of journalism, it is important to consider the opportunities that the tool can offer as well as the dangers it possesses. Generally speaking, humans are inherently lazy – and that’s the exact reason as to why we created technological tools such as AI. Connock argues that: “The decline of journalism was never AI’s doing… AI won’t decide journalism’s fate; the business model will. Where publishers use it to do more of the distinctive human work, it promotes growth; where they use it to do cheap work faster, it hastens the end.”

Consequently, it is exceptionally important for journalists to maintain their passion in striving for verified, correct information as it is our duty as journalists to supply the people with the necessary information for them to form their own opinions. Journalism did not meet its end when the internet was born, and it most certainly isn’t going anywhere in this new age.