Ricerca

The growing adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism has so far been examined mainly in terms of automation, ethical concerns, and audience perceptions. While these perspectives are important, they remain insufficient to account for a more fundamental transformation: the epistemological status of journalistic writing when textual production is mediated by automated processes. The central issue is not simply who writes, but how journalistic claims are justified, verified, and rendered accountable in the public sphere.

Building on Luciano Floridi’s concept of distant writing and integrating scholarship from journalism studies, epistemology of news, and computational journalism, this article introduces the paradigm of Distant Writing Journalism (DWJ). DWJ reconceptualizes journalistic writing as a design-oriented practice in which journalists are responsible for the processes that lead to the production of texts, rather than for the mechanical act of writing itself.

The article makes three main contributions. It provides a theoretical foundation for DWJ by rethinking authorship, intention, and operational truth in the context of AI-mediated writing. It formalizes an operational method based on claim mapping, verification-by-design, and process disclosure, conceived as replicable and open to empirical assessment. It examines the implications of DWJ for newsroom organization, editorial governance, and public trust, arguing that transparency of method can strengthen journalistic accountability.

The article concludes that Distant Writing Journalism is not a marginal option but a necessary condition for preserving journalism’s role as a practice of responsible public knowledge production in the age of generative artificial intelligence.

In italiano, in breve: con l’AI generativa la questione per il giornalismo non è solo chi scrive, ma come le affermazioni giornalistiche vengono giustificate, verificate e rese responsabili. Il saggio propone il paradigma del Distant Writing Journalism, in cui il giornalista risponde dei processi che producono il testo, e ne delinea un metodo: mappatura delle affermazioni, verifica fin dalla progettazione, dichiarazione del processo. Questa sintesi è mia e non è una traduzione ufficiale dell’abstract.