Insight

How the AI revolution can save journalism

By Ben Moore-Bridger,

Head of News

With increasingly sophisticated breakthroughs in artificial intelligence becoming commonplace, the very technology expected to kill off traditional journalism could actually turn out to be its greatest saviour.

One thing that AI tools like Google DeepMind’s Veo 3, OpenAI’s Sora, or voice clone technology from ElevenLabs shows is that the internet is becoming increasingly deeply untrustworthy.

There is a media ecosystem in the digital landscape where anyone, anywhere, can produce high-quality visual and audio content that looks completely real - and can be entirely false.

Launched in May this year, Veo 3, for example, can generate high-definition, cinematically styled videos with drone shots, time-lapses, and realistic motion entirely from a text prompt. Sora is doing the same. If you want a video of a fake city being invaded by tanks that never existed, no problem. Want a fake Rachel Reeves giving a fake speech about interest rates? Easily done - especially when you combine it with voice cloning tech that can mimic tone, cadence and emotional nuance to a chilling degree.

And this isn’t a hypothetical risk.

In 2023, a “deepfaked” image of an explosion near the Pentagon shared widely on social media briefly wiped billions off the markets. During the 2024 presidential election, AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden fooled thousands of voters ahead of the New Hampshire primary.

And last year British engineering company Arup fell victim to fraud after an employee was tricked into sending £20 million to criminals using AI to clone the company’s CFO on a video call.

In these cases, the deception worked because the audio and visuals were realistic enough to dupe people in real time.

Such uncertainty over content, particularly online, means “fake news” is anywhere and everywhere. As such, established newspapers and broadcasters are once again becoming the bastions of veracity. Stalwarts against the tide of misinformation.

Because in a world where everything can be manipulated, trust is the only currency, and it is these sometimes centuries-old publications with well-established editorial standards, oversight, and hard-won credibility that should prosper.

It is an irony few would have predicted a decade ago, when social platforms were ascendant, trust in the press was in freefall, and many were predicting the demise of such “legacy” media organisations.

Newspapers and broadcasters, who have spent years trying to catch up to modern consumer demands, are suddenly looking increasingly vital. They employ real people, make real phone calls, and send real reporters to real places, which is why building relationships with these journalists is more important than ever for those wanting to tell authentic stories.

Their slowness, long viewed as a liability, now looks like a feature. When misinformation can be produced faster than truth, the patience required for fact-checking and editorial sign-off is increasingly an essential civic service.

It is no coincidence that the BBC launched Verify, its specialist verification unit, with enormous fanfare two years ago. The idea was to counter the tsunami of AI-generated content with human-led investigation: geolocation of video, source tracing, image forensics. Viewers were reassured by it. Other outlets, from The Washington Post to Reuters, are copying the model.

But BBC Verify has also sparked a quiet war inside newsrooms. Many reporters bristle at the implication that verification is some elite activity reserved for a chosen few, rather than the bedrock of what journalism is meant to be. As one BBC journalist privately put it: “We all verify things. That’s our job. So why the label?”

Yet from a public perspective, the branding is the point. When trust in content is vanishing, trust in process has to be made visible.

In a world of invisible manipulation, audiences want to see the gears turning. Which explains the desire for BBC Verify Live - a new BBC initiative launched in June that will see journalists sharing their work throughout the day via a real-time live news feed, taking audiences “behind the scenes” to see their work in action.

AI was supposed to democratise content and do away with the need for editorial gatekeepers. Instead, legacy media, with its trained reporters, editorial firewalls, lawyers, and institutional memory, is now more important than ever.

The AI age will belong not just to the innovators, but to the editors. And perhaps the very forces that once threatened journalism’s extinction will now ensure its survival.