Dystopia, Inc: Would you like your news with or without hallucinations?
THE obituaries of news agencies have been written on many occasions over the past two decades.
First we were told we were slower than Twitter and that our global network of salaried journalists was redundant because every citizen was a journalist now.
Who needs to pay for ethically-produced fact-checked content when information from the source is flowing directly into our phones in real time?
We all remember the euphoria of the Twitter Revolution in Iran in 2009 and the Facebook follow-up Arab Spring (2010-2012). It was intoxicating to see the free flow of information on social networks from citizens on the front line.
THE obituaries of news agencies have been written on many occasions over the past two decades.
But we also all remember the brutal comedown. What happens when the autocrats shut down the internet or throw your citizens in jail? Who continues to document the story in Iran or Egypt or Syria for the outside world?
It turned out social media algorithms were not driven by a need to search for the truth.
Silicon Valley worked out it would make more money promoting anger and outrage. It also turned out bad actors could manipulate these algorithms to promote lies. Not surprisingly, untrained citizens were not equipped to help society navigate the pollution of our information ecosystem.
Wind forward another decade and we are here again as we are presented with another ‘news agency killer’, the utopian future of Artificial Intelligence.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok can scan the world’s journalism output in seconds and spit out five juicy paragraphs to tell you about anything that’s going on in the world.
This is the so-called AI Overview — it is causing traffic to trusted journalism sites across the globe to crash and it rarely pays for the expensively-produced professional journalism it hoovers up.
And so again we are asked: why pay for your professional journalism when information is being delivered free in real time? Why waste money employing journalists to gather information that can be aggregated by our new chatbot friends?
Part of the answer lies in the little chatbot disclaimer which says the information in your AI overview may actually be wrong. Would you like your news with or without hallucinations?
Getting to the facts costs money, time, expertise and effort.
When a huge glacial collapse in late August triggered devastating flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border leaving more than 1,300 people dead, AFP deployed a team of 11 journalists on the ground in remote parts of Nepal and India.
Within an hour of police confirmation of the first major flooding three of our journalists based in Kathmandu were on the road.
Prakash Mathema, Anup Ojha and Prabin Ranabhat are all Nepalese. They know the language, the terrain and the people. They carried expensive cameras and drone equipment.
One of our photographers made a 13-hour journey by motorbike and truck to reach the main disaster zone. He was then able to use his contacts to take an aid helicopter further into the disaster zone. His stunning drone images of destroyed villages were seen across the world.
In a catastrophe in remote areas of the planet, often there is no internet. It requires journalists to be on the ground, sometimes putting themselves in considerable personal danger, to bear witness to events.
It also requires journalists who know the country and can turn to a reliable source network. While part of our Nepal team headed to the mountains, the rest remained in Kathmandu to sift fact from rumour as stories of dead and missing emerged.
Many of the first reliable words and pictures published by the global media came from agencies such as AFP and our colleagues at Reuters and AP.
Our clients use the content without hesitation because they know it has been gathered in an ethically correct way according to the transparent charters and trust principles which guide the work of all our journalists.
They know that we have employed professional journalists to gather information and that we invest resources in training and expertise to ensure the people we send into harm’s way are well prepared.
Clients pay for the product because they understand quality news-gathering is not cheap. They also understand we work to the same ethical guidelines from every dateline on the planet. It makes no difference whether the content comes from Nepal or New York or Gaza, it bears the same stamp of quality.
On the other hand, making stuff up costs nothing. Side by side with real journalistic images from the Nepal disaster zone were reams of deep fake images showing artificially generated destroyed villages and bodies lined up for burial.
The tools that have given us AI Overviews have also given every human on the planet the capacity to create confusing and damaging false images that clog up our news feeds and often go viral on social media.
At AFP we employ over 100 journalists exclusively working to debunk and fact check this growing fake tide. Pushing back on lies and manipulation has become an essential journalistic complement to searching for the truth.
Defending truth and facts costs money and requires values. The international agencies’ global networks remain an essential part of the fabric of the global information system. They should be cherished, and defended.
The writer is Global News Director at Agence France Presse (AFP). This opinion piece was commissioned as part of the World News Day campaign — which falls on Sept 28 — highlighting the essential role of journalism in providing facts and clarity.
Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2026
The post Dystopia, Inc: Would you like your news with or without hallucinations? appeared first on Dawn – Home.
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