During his weekly radio broadcast President Rafael Correa accused media outlets of committing “abuses” and “distorting” information arguing that the media had been manipulating citizens’ opinion and has threatened they will face legal action. Read more here
In mid-May 2023, The Irish Times published an article that accused women who use fake tan of mocking those with naturally dark skin. The op-ed was initially said to be written by Adriana Acosta-Cortez, a 29-year-old Ecuadorian health worker living in north Dublin.
But no such person existed. “The article and the accompanying byline photo may have been produced, at least in part, using generative AI technology,” read an editorial in The Irish Times four days after the piece first published.
Two months later, HoldtheFrontPage— a news website for journalists with a focus on regional media across the UK— published an investigative piece documenting how artificial intelligence (AI) was used to launch a publication purporting to be called The Bournemouth Observer, which turned out to be a fake newspaper. “It was obvious that the content was written by AI because the writing was so bad,” editor of HoldtheFrontPage, Paul Linford, told Index. “But since then, AI has got much better at writing stories, and I suspect it will eventually become harder to spot when writing is being done by AI or real journalists,” said Linford.
Index on Censorship was also caught out by a journalist calling themselves Margaux Blanchard whose article was published in the Spring edition of the magazine. Ironically it was about journalism in Guatemala and written by AI. Others – Wired and Business Insider – also fell victim to “Margaux”.
James Barrat claimed AI “will eventually bring about the death of writing as we know it.” The American documentary maker and author has been researching and writing about AI for more than a decade. His previous books include Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (2013), which ChatGPT recently ingested. “There are presently ongoing lawsuits about this because OpenAI took my book [without my permission] and didn’t pay me,” Barrat explained. “Right now, if you tell ChatGPT ‘write in the style of James Barrat’ it doesn’t produce an exact replica, but it’s adequate, and machine writing is getting better all the time.”
In early September, Barrat published The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything (2025). The book makes two bold predictions. First, AI has the potential in the not-too-distant future to potentially match, and perhaps even surpass, our species’ intelligence. Second, by 2030 AI will eliminate 30 percent of all jobs done by humans, including writers. Freelance journalists will benefit in the short term, Barrat claimed. “Soon a basic features writer, using AI, will be able to produce twice as much content and get paid twice as much,” he said. “But in long run the news organisations will get rid of [most] writers because people won’t care if content is written by AI or not.”
Tobias Rose-Stockwell did not share that view. “There will always be a market for verified accurate information, which requires humans,” the American writer, designer, technologist and media researcher said. “So truthful journalism isn’t going away, but it’s going to be disrupted by AI, which can now generate content in real time. This will lead to more viral falsehoods, confusion and chaos in our information ecosystem.”
Rose-Stockwell elaborated on this topic in Outrage Machine (2023). The book documents how the rise of social media in the mid-2000s was made possible by algorithms, which are mathematical instructions that process data to produce specific outcomes. In the early days of social media users viewed their feeds in chronological order. Eventually, though, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and other social media platforms realised it was more profitable to organise that information via algorithmic feeds, powered by artificial intelligence and, in particular, machine learning (ML) where AI is used to identify behaviours and patterns that may be missed by human observers. ML tools analyse users’ behaviour, preferences, and interactions, keeping them emotionally engaged for longer. “Feed algorithms are much better at re-coordinating content than any human ever could,” said Rose-Stockwell. “They can even create bespoke little newspapers or television shows for us.”
“AI is already in the process of rapidly transforming journalism,” said Dr Tomasz Hollanek, a technology ethics specialist at the University of Cambridge with expertise in intercultural AI ethics and ethical human-AI interaction design. “As AI systems become more adept at producing content that appears authentic, detecting fabricated material will get harder.”
Hollanek spoke about editors giving journalists clear guidelines about when and where AI can be used. The Associated Press, for instance, currently allows staff to test AI tools but bans publishing AI-generated text directly.
“What’s important about these guidelines is that while they recognise AI as a new tool, they also stress that journalism already has mechanisms for accountability,” said Hollanek. He also criticised the sensationalist tone journalists typically take when writing about AI, pointing to unnecessary hype, which leads to distorted public understanding and skewed policy debates.
“Journalists strengthening their own critical AI literacy will make the public more informed about AI and more capable of shaping its trajectory.”
Petra Molnar, a Canadian lawyer and anthropologist who specialises in migration and human rights, claimed “the general public needs to understand that AI is not some abstract tool out there, but it’s already structuring our everyday lives.”
Molnar said there is an urgent need for public awareness campaigns that make AI’s role in news and politics visible and trackable. She described companies such as Meta, X, Amazon, and OpenAI as “global gatekeepers [of information] with the power to amplify some voices while silencing others, often reinforcing existing inequalities.”
“Most people experience AI through tools like news feeds, predictive texts, or search engines, yet many do not realise how profoundly AI shapes what they see and think,” said Molnar, who is the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, Toronto— which undertakes research and advocacy about legal analytics, artificial intelligence, and new border control technologies that impact refugees.“AI is often presented as a neutral tool, but the reality is that it encodes power.”
Last year, Molnar published The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024). The book draws attention to a recent proliferation across the globe of digital technologies that are used to track and survey refugees, political dissidents, and frontline activists crossing borders in times of conflict. Molnar claimed that “AI threatens to accelerate the collapse of journalism by privileging speed and engagement over accuracy and depth.” She cited examples of journalists using OpenAI-generated text tools to churn our surface-level articles that echo sensational framings around migration, without investigative depth.
“Automated systems may generate content that looks like journalism, but it’s stripped of accountability and critical inquiry that’s required to tell complex stories,” said Molnar. “Journalism’s future depends on human reporters who can investigate power and rigorously fact check, something AI simply cannot replicate.”
Sam Taylor, campaigns & communications officer at the UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ), shared that view. “Editors and writers should exercise caution before using AI in their work,” he said. “Generative AI often draws on databases from the internet that contains stereotypes, biases, and misinformation.”
“To maintain and strengthen public trust in journalism, AI must only be used as an assistive tool with human oversight,” said NUJ general secretary, Laura Davison.
Everyone Index spoke to agreed that AI, for all its flaws, offers journalists enormous benefits, including automating mundane routine tasks, like transcription and data sorting. AI can also make data journalism, exploring large data sets to uncover stories, much more accessible as AI can crunch the data and identify interesting nuggets far faster than a person can. This will leave journalists with more time and energy for critical thinking, and ultimately, to tell more complex and nuanced stories.
But there was also an overwhelming consensus that AI cannot fact-check accurately or be trusted as a credible verifier of information. Not least because it suffers from hallucinations. “This means due to the complexity of what is going on inside it hallucinates,” James Barrat explained. “When this happens, AI gets confused and tells lies.”
“The jury is still out on whether or not this hallucination problem can be solved or not,” said Tobias Rose-Stockwell. “Journalism must remain grounded in ethical responsibility and context,” said Petra Molnar. “What we need is human judgement, applied critically and ethically, supported by but not replaced by technology.”
Anyone who believes in journalism’s primary mission, to challenge power by investigating the truth, is undoubtedly likely to agree. But is this wishful thinking from a bygone era? James Barrat believes so. He points out that, eventually, we may not have the option to choose. “A scenario that could happen in near future is that AI could become hostile to us,” he said. “AI could take control of our water and our electrical systems. Just recently, a large language model (LLM) agreed that its creator should be killed.”
Barrat mentions an interview he did with the British science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C Clarke, before his death, aged 90, in 2008. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the Oscar winning film tells the story of an AI-powered computer— aboard the Discovery One spacecraft bound for the planet Jupiter— called HAL. Eventually, HAL experiences a program conflict, malfunctions, and, to defend itself, turns on its human crew members.
Arthur C Clarke told Barrat, “Humans steer the future because we are the most intelligent species on the planet, but when we share the planet with something smarter than us, they will steer the future.”
“AI’s intelligence grows exponentially,” Barrat concludes. “As it gets smarter, we will stop understanding it. We really are inviting disaster.”
The autumn issue of Index magazine, titled Truth, trust and tricksters and published on 26 September, looks at the threats that artificial intelligence poses to freedom of expression
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
Today, Index on Censorship announces the shortlist for its annual Freedom of Expression Award. The shortlist of 13 organisations and individuals from nine countries across five continents, highlights how free expression can be protected at a time of growing instability, authoritarianism and censorship. Each nominee covers diverse and critical issues such as the treatment of political prisoners in conflict zones, empowering citizen journalism and accountability, championing independent journalism, defending the rights of women and the LGBTQ communities, opposing war propaganda and authoritarianism, celebrating local languages, cultures and identities and countering disinformation.
Divided into three categories: Arts, Campaigning and Journalism, the annual award is an opportunity to celebrate the courage and creativity of the journalists, artists, campaigners and dissidents who, against all odds and at times facing threats of persecution, harassment, imprisonment or death, speak out and speak up to defend human rights and democracy.
The short list announced today is:
Arts
Campaigning
Journalism
Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship said:
Judging these awards was a truly humbling experience. I am always overwhelmed by the bravery of our award nominees and no more so than this year. The march of authoritarianism has seemingly picked up pace across the globe but it’s heartening to know that everywhere there are still people willing to fight for what is right, even if they end up paying an extreme price in doing so. I look forward to celebrating the winners later on this year and want to say my own thanks to everyone on the shortlist – you are all inspiring and make the world better.
Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, the Chair of Index on Censorship said:
It’s always one of the hardest moments of the year – we are always faced with candidates for the awards who are talented, impactful and courageous. It’s humbling – but always worthwhile because we know from the dictators’ regular annoyance at the winners that they really make a difference.
The Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award, established in 2001, has long championed those who have risked everything for the right to speak out and defend democracy and human rights. Previous winners include the imprisoned Iranian rapper, Toomaj Salehi; the Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai; the global whistleblowing platform, Wikileaks; the Turkish artist, Zehra Dogan; Honduran investigative journalist, Wendy Funes and many others.
This year’s shortlist demonstrates the creative, courageous and diverse voices opposing authoritarianism and silence. The winners will be announced on 20 November at a ceremony in London. The jury panel for the 2024 awards is made up of Baroness Hollick OBE; Ziyad Marar, President of Global Publishing at Sage; Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, chair of Index on Censorship; Ben Preston, Culture, Arts and Books Editor of The Times & Sunday Times; Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship.
ENDS
Media contact:
Index on Censorship is a non-profit organisation that campaigns for and defends free expression worldwide, including by publishing work by censored writers and artists and monitoring threats to free speech. We lead global advocacy campaigns to protect artistic, academic, media and digital freedom to strengthen the participatory foundations of modern democratic societies. www.indexoncensorship.org