“The one who holds the pen is like the one who holds the sword; in the right hand of each is a weapon of the past,” wrote Anton Al-Jamil, founder of “Al-Zuhur” magazine in Cairo , stressing that “not everyone who wields a pen is a writer,” and that journalism should be “a tree of truth on whose branches honest writers sing.”
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But this traditional image of journalism is facing a new test today, as artificial intelligence is now able to create a pen and its writer, create websites that mimic media institutions, and produce thousands of news items without real journalists.
Whereas journalism used to be based on gathering, verifying, and questioning information from its sources, it has become possible to create a complete news system that appears genuine on the surface, including websites and writers with fake identities and professional profiles, and pumping out content in huge quantities, without necessarily having a real newsroom or a responsible editorial process behind it.
The danger is not limited to spreading misinformation and expanding its reach, but extends to undermining public trust in the news, when it becomes more difficult to distinguish between a real journalistic institution and an artificial one, and between content based on verification and content that mimics journalism without adhering to its standards. French investigative journalist Jean-Marc Manasché revealed that, over the course of two years, he had identified more than 15,000 AI-generated news sites in French alone, and about 1,500 in English, in addition to hundreds of sites in other languages.
In a separate count, NewsGuard, which specializes in assessing the credibility of news sources, counted 3,749 news and information sites within what it describes as AI-generated content farms, distributed across 16 languages, according to its latest data update on June 23, 2026.
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