The project explores the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) for news work and journalism’s normative democratic roles. The project studies how GAI is being developed and integrated into journalistic work, analysing how traditionally important journalistic norms and ethics shape the deployment of GAI in newsrooms as well as how the norms, ethics and practices are reinvented and rearticulated in these processes. The project adopts a futures-oriented perspective by investigating not only the existing applications and conceptions but also the potential uses and expectations regarding GAI in newswork. A central question here is how GAI could be re-imagined so that it would better fulfill journalism’s democratic roles, such as providing public service and enhancing active citizenship. In order to produce topical insights into the question of media and democracy in Finland in 2020’s in the context of newsroom GAI, the study’s empirical focus is on technologically advanced legacy newsrooms and their AI-related actors in Finland and Sweden. The research team has been granted access to four newsrooms. The media analysed in Sweden have relevance also to how GAI is being implemented into news work in Finnish newsrooms. The qualitative data are collected from case studies at three newsrooms and their AI developer teams. The research material is collected by ethnographic participant observation of teams that develop and deploy journalistic AI, semi-structured interviews with team members, and document analysis of materials and expert predictions connected to newsroom GAI. The data gathered also include scenario workshops which bring researchers, journalism practitioners, and other stakeholders together to systematically map out the possible and plausible futures of GAI in the news industry.

2025