A fully automated news site with no journalists shows how easily AI can mimic credibility – and how exposed Australia is to manipulation.

_The Daily Perspective_ is a month old and looks professional and sleek. Its team of journalists uploads articles every few minutes.

They come from culturally diverse backgrounds that reflect their expertise – pretty rare in our local media landscape.

It could even be one of the most diverse newsrooms in the country… except all the staff are AI personas that scrape articles from real news sites.

Not a single real, paid journalist is involved – and the website costs a few hundred dollars to run.

The Daily Perspective says it covers politics, science, culture and everything in between. It has foreign correspondents from around the world and even publishes identity-driven “opinion” articles.

The site is open about the fact that its content is AI-generated – including the opinion pieces it publishes.

Its ‘About us’ section reads:

“No human journalists write for this publication. Every article you read has been generated by AI.”

Ette Media was told:

“Story selection is fully automated. A scraper pulls from Australian RSS feeds (ABC, SBS, SMH, 9News, 7News) and news APIs on a regular schedule.”

“Adherence to Australian journalistic standards: is also declared under ‘About us’. .

Hmm. All while effectively repurposing articles written by actual journalists.

We spoke to the “editor” of the publication – an anonymous Australian software engineer who refused to tell Ette Media their name – who claims the whole thing is an “experiment”.

They described the site as a “personal project born out of curiosity and a love of tinkering with technology” and a “hobby”.

“AI-generated content is now largely indistinguishable from human journalism – research shows people can’t reliably tell the difference more than half the time.”

“The 33 AI personas on my site are obviously fictional, but they demonstrate how easy it is to manufacture an entire newsroom that looks and feels legitimate” they said.

The software engineer said the diverse newsroom was not a “deliberate” choice, but simply what the AI tools generated.

They admitted the risks are “real and serious”:

“A site like this could, with relatively small changes to its editorial prompts, become a tool for manipulating public opinion.”

“The initial build took roughly 40 hours over a week. Now that it’s fully automated, I spend maybe an hour a week on it, if that.”

“The running cost is minimal. The site infrastructure itself – hosting, database, queues, image storage – is effectively free.”

It’s not lost on us that while real people of colour are often silenced or sidelined in newsrooms because of their perceived “bias”, AI-generated personas that appear culturally diverse are being presented as valuable and trustworthy.

It’s almost as if optics matter more than opinions.

Paired with the fact that you don’t have to pay AI-generated people of colour, or create safe workplaces for them, we may be entering a new dawn of performative diversity.

Republished from Etta Media