If AI is the editor, who sets the standards?

AI-produced or supplemented content is proliferating on the web and in news media. The speed at which this trend has evolved is breathtaking to say the least. In a world where most of our careers started in journalism, communications, editorial, or media tech, it is important to put the present in perspective so we can safeguard the future of news.

First, ask yourself:

1.     Do editorial judgment, verification, and correction policies play a role in the announcements or news you are creating or ingesting?
2.     Are your teams able to separate signals from noise, and how is it being done?
3.     What guardrails does your company, newsroom, or communications team have in place to protect editorial quality and public understanding?

Upon reflection, we can see that what was once taken for granted seems to have become fast forgotten. In an age when AI increasingly assembles our news feeds, forgetting about guardrails is not optional. Editorial guardrails are more important than ever, the difference between collective learning and collective confusion. That is why preserving news and information standards matters more than ever.

Two timely reads point to where this is headed

• Personalised AI briefings may shift the “front door” of news from publishers to assistants that stitch updates from our histories (Pete Pachel, “AI is becoming your morning briefing, and the media should worry,” Media Copilot, October 14, 2025).
• AI-generated articles briefly outnumbered human-written ones in late 2024 but now sit near parity, while search and chat still tend to surface human-written sources (Megan Morrone, “AI writing hasn’t won the web yet,” Axios AI+, October 14, 2025).

I believe we are at what I call a “compounding quality risk” cross-roads: if distribution optimises for scale with cheap text over provenance, tomorrow’s models learn from today’s synthetic exhaust. Even if AI has not “won the web,” the briefing layer is advancing fast, amplifying whatever sources it is fed. The result, as AI-generated news proliferates, the potential for the garbage-in garbage-out effect increases if we do not ensure news integrity across platforms.

What to watch to preserve integrity across the web, newsrooms, communications platforms, and research systems?

1. Source transparency: disclose sources and model mix, and when copy is machine-generated.
   

2. Attribution by default: link back to the source so readers can verify, cite, and correct.

3. Evidence-first inputs: prioritise professional and scholarly material, attributable corpora from fact-checked, authoritative, and peer-reviewed sources for RAG, fine-tuning, training, and discovery; de-emphasise open-web and wikis except as clearly labelled context, and with audit trails so people can decide fact or fiction.

If AI is becoming the editor, let's make sure it is an accountable one.

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