‘The story of what journalism stands to lose: its human soul’

PICTURE: Asanda Matlhare/The Citizen

Phathiswa Magopeni

Executive Director

Press Council of South Africa

The AI wave is one of our biggest opportunities yet, and promises to deliver a great deal of value for mankind. But experience suggests we also have to be careful; this  technology is so powerful that it threatens dystopian outcomes.

These are the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in his book This is for Everyone, published this year.

There is no doubt that this is a moment of profound transition for journalism. There have been several transitions before and some overlapping. Journalism is now being reshaped not just by politics or power, but by code, data and algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence has entered newsrooms with remarkable speed, with a promise of efficiency, precision and predictive insight. Yet, beneath the optimism lies a quieter, less examined reality: the profound reshaping of journalism’s ethical spine, professional identity and democratic purpose.

The current debates about its role in automation, productivity and job losses are only fragments of a deeper story. It’s the story of what journalism stands to lose — its human soul.

I want us to examine briefly some of the often-overlooked real-life consequences of Artificial Intelligence for journalists and newsrooms. The first consequence, and probably the most insidious, is the erosion of editorial and journalistic instinct and autonomy.

AI-driven tools are now integral to editorial workflows, recommending story angles, headlines and suggesting what is newsworthy. While these tools promise efficiency, they also risk diminishing the intuitive judgement of journalists

Human editorial instinct, which is built from experience, context and ethical reasoning, is being replaced by algorithmic patterning. Slowly and subtly, algorithms  are deciding what is newsworthy, and the journalist, once the agenda-setter, is being reduced to a data interpreter.

The question we must ask ourselves is: what happens to journalism when the journalistic instinct and autonomy give way to automation? How do we proactively  mitigate the impact?

The second consideration is the invisible digital gatekeeping that occurs behind the scenes, where algorithms already shape what stories get told and whose voices are amplified.

Newsrooms are increasingly relying on AI analytics and audience prediction systems to determine ‘hot and sexy story angles’ to drive talkability value, which is essentially marketing. This fundamentally shifts editorial priorities toward engagement metrics over public value.

The result is a creeping loss of journalistic and editorial sovereignty, where the power to define what matters migrates from journalists to digital tools. When we write to please algorithms instead of informing the public, our newsrooms become engines of optimisation, not truth

The third real-life consequence is cultural and linguistic distortion, which emanates from the fact that most AI tools are trained on Western data and linguistic structures. For journalists operating in the African context, this creates an epistemic distortion as languages, idioms, metaphors and cultural references are flattened into data noise.

This quiet digital colonialism threatens the authenticity of African storytelling and turns local nuance into global uniformity. I have just listened with fascination to Helen in the previous panel using polygamy to explain the GNU. Contextualising information using such metaphors and shared knowledge is a beautiful effective tool and makes complex issues easy to understand. But we are gradually losing that resource.

This also means that newsrooms relying on machine-aided translation for African languages news services have a greater responsibility to maintain the linguistic quality, cultural empathy and integrity reserved for English news audiences.

Another reality to consider is the psychological and professional displacement of journalists. Synthetic media, such as AI-generated articles and visuals, blur the line between human and machine authorship. For many journalists, this creates a new form of existential anxiety, which is not just about relevance, but about identity.

When audiences can no longer tell who or what wrote the news, journalists face a crisis of legitimacy and emotional anxiety that few institutions are prepared to manage. This is not merely a technical and operational issue, but a wellness concern

I have engaged with newsrooms on ethical issues around disclosing the use of AI in generating articles and visual material. The questions they raise consistently revolve around the extent to which disclosures must be made, and the impact on audience trust, professional displacement of journalists and the erasure of the journalistic effort.

Newsrooms must address this issue with intention.

One other point to note is that, while there has been progress in developing editorial policies and codes for ethical AI usage in newsrooms, knowledge gaps remain in their design, as some merely replicate existing ethical frameworks. This is further complicated by insufficient training provided to journalists.

For instance, when AI-assisted reporting without dedicated editorial oversight causes harm, through misinformation, mislabelling or bias, accountability becomes diffused.

Who is responsible? Is it the journalist, the developer or the newsroom? The answer remains elusive, creating an accountability blind spot that weakens both ethics and regulation. These ethical and accountability gaps must be addressed. The Press Council is also paying attention to this issue.

Furthermore, the silent deprofessionalisation of journalism and the disintegration of the newsroom poses a threat now and for the future of the craft. The ability of AI to scrape and aggregate information and automate content creation poses a risk of reducing journalism to mere content production.

Newsrooms, driven by the need for speed and scale, and facing pressures to sustain themselves and contain costs, are gradually undervaluing field reporting, investigative depth in their reportage, and editorial deliberation.

This puts journalists at risk of becoming content operators, that is, being efficient but disposable.

Currently, we are witnessing a raging debate on whether content creators are journalists or not, as well as their impact on journalism. We need to pause and think hard about the implications of this debate for journalism as an institutional field and journalists as guardians of the public record.

At the same time, AI-driven newsroom workflows are diminishing the social and collaborative dimensions of newsroom life. Automated transcription, translation and  content sorting reduce interpersonal dialogue, yet these are the very debates that once refined editorial due diligence, journalistic duty of care and nurtured ethical culture.

Slowly, the newsroom is becoming less a community of inquiry and more a chain of technology-mediated tasks. In all of this we must ensure that information integrity is enhanced and human dignity preserved throughout the media ecosystem amid AI challenges and regardless of the actors.

We balance the need for AI-driven skills and other technology-oriented expertise with ethical and human rights considerations and the public duty of journalists in our newsroom practices.

There other factor already prominent in the public discourse is that AI-driven digital affordances have empowered peddlers of information disorders and propagandists, enabling them fabricate reality with precision. Synthetic media such as deepfakes, synthetic audio, and automated narratives now challenge journalists to verify what is almost unverifiable. This requires additional oversight layers and responsibility, and stretches newsrooms with already limited resources.

Finally, as AI systems reward what performs well, and not what matters, where newsrooms are chasing algorithmic success, the diversity of narratives is declining.

The subtle, local and uncomfortable stories, as well as unexciting but important public affairs stories that sustain social life and democracy, are being drowned out by pattern-based predictability

As a result, the moral and cultural function of journalism to expand the public imagination is being quietly diminished. The frontline of journalism has shifted from the field to the algorithm, which is a battle over truth itself.

This requires not just the review of newsroom management and retraining of practising journalists, but also a complete overhaul of the journalism curriculum for those who are in the pipeline to be able to confront these challenges. We must be careful not to train a generation of journalists who know how to prompt an AI bot, but not how to interrogate power and pursue truth.

So, the real question is no longer whether AI will replace journalists, but whether journalists will still recognise themselves in the AI-infused newsroom. The question is how journalism will retain its soul in an AI-enabled environment. Will journalists still have the space and courage to question, to feel, to resist, or are they going to adjust, until truth itself becomes quietly AI-generated?

We must bear in mind that while AI tools can write, summarise and optimise, they cannot care. The cultural authority of journalism has never been in data and speed, but in its moral intent. AI can imitate and aggregate information, but it cannot replicate the conviction of the journalists behind it, because journalism is not a codebase.

In an era where machines can generate facts and blur truth, moral courage becomes
journalism’s most prized asset. It will take brave journalists through independent and
thorough verification, to interrogate algorithms, resist manipulation and defend
inconvenient truths.

While embracing the advantages of AI, we must ensure that journalism retains its essence, human judgement and moral autonomy. To defend its soul, we must protect the right of journalists to pause, doubt, question and decide. These are deeply human acts that algorithms cannot replicate.

The integrity of journalism depends on ethical resistance, and not technological obedience. While embracing the efficiencies of AI, journalists must resist becoming passive operators of systems that prioritise virality over veracity. Newsrooms must infuse technology with humanity, and resist surrendering humanity to technology.

It is stories that move societies because they connect emotion to fact – a power that no machine can truly grasp. The empathy, curiosity and moral imagination of a journalist are becoming more critical for journalism that serves humanity. If we lose those, journalism will survive as an industry but die as a public good

In conclusion, journalism is not merely about information, but humanity, and no algorithm, no matter how advanced, can ever replicate the moral courage to investigate corruption, interrogate power and tell the truth.

Therefore, it is not in the interest of journalists to compete with AI or similar technologies, which would be a waste of their valuable time, but rather to remind the world that truth still needs a human heart to tell it. That is the contribution of journalists and journalism to upholding the integrity of the news and information ecosystem.

• Magopeni delivered this speech at the Media Freedom Festival held at the Joburg Theatre on 19 October 2025 and hosted by Media Monitoring Africa and its 13 partners including the Association of Independent Publishers, Amnesty International South Africa, the Campaign for Free Expression, the Campaign on Digital Ethics, Defend Our Democracy, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of Germany, the High Commission of Canada, The Information Regulator, the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung Sub-Saharan Africa Media Programme, the Press Council of South Africa, SOS Support Public Broadcasting Coalition and We the People SA