An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.
The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said.
The four-page Il Foglio AI has been wrapped into the newspaper’s slim broadsheet edition, and is available on newsstands and online from Tuesday.
“It will be the first daily newspaper in the world on newsstands created entirely using artificial intelligence,” said Cerasa. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony.” He added that journalists’ roles would be limited to “asking questions [into an AI tool] and reading the answers”.
The experiment comes as news organisations around the world grapple with how AI should be deployed. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that BBC News was to use AI to give the public more personalised content.
The front page of the first edition of Il Foglio AI carries a story referring to the US president, Donald Trump, describing the “paradox of Italian Trumpians” and how they rail against “cancel culture” yet either turn a blind eye, or worse, “celebrate” when “their idol in the US behaves like the despot of a banana republic”.
The front page also features a column headlined “Putin, the 10 betrayals”, with the article highlighting “20 years of broken promises, torn-up agreements and words betrayed” by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
In a rare upbeat story about the Italian economy, another article points to the latest report from Istat, the national statistics agency, on the redistribution of income, which shows the country “is changing, and not for the worse” with salary increases for about 750,000 workers being among the positive effects of income tax reforms.
On page 2 is a story about “situationships” and how young Europeans are fleeing steady relationships.
The articles were structured, straightforward and clear, with no obvious grammatical errors.
However, none of the articles published in the news pages directly quote any human beings.
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The final page runs AI-generated letters from readers to the editor, with one asking whether AI will render humans “useless” in the future. “AI is a great innovation, but it doesn’t yet know how to order a coffee without getting the sugar wrong,” reads the AI-generated response.
Cerasa said Il Foglio AI reflected “a real newspaper” and was the product of “news, debate and provocations”. But it was also a testing ground to show how AI could work “in practice”, he said, while seeing what the impact would be on producing a daily newspaper with the technology and the questions “we are forced to ask ourselves, not only from a journalistic nature”.
“It is just another [Il] Foglio made with intelligence, don’t call it artificial,” Cerasa said.
