Breaking the News? GenAI’s impact on journalism and its implications for disinformation

Generative AI (GenAI) is mostly seen as a risk factor, because it simplifies creating and spreading disinformation. However, in addition to being a useful tool for bad-faith actors, the increasing uptake of GenAI also transforms the media ecology in other, more structural ways. Focusing on the democratic institution of journalism – which is crucial for providing public access to high-quality information – this paper establishes how GenAI is reshaping journalistic workflows and how this might affect journalism’s capacity to counter disinformation effectively. To this end, we conduct a literature review on the impact of GenAI on journalism and synthesize key insights across the journalistic value chain to identify four key disinformation risks, namely (1) loss of editorial control and epistemic authority, (2) decreasing journalistic quality, (3) exacerbated economic pressures, and (4) decreasing audience trust. We close with a research agenda on how to assess, mitigate, and prevent these risks.