Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of global publishing at an unprecedented speed. While Axel Springer is laying off the entire Italian editorial staff of Upday to replace them with ChatGPT, newspapers such as Ilfozio are recording a 60% increase in sales thanks to an insert written entirely by AI. But behind the scenes, a disturbing truth is emerging. Many revolutionary AI solutions are actually human workers in disguise from the Amazon just walk out case, 1,000 Ports Indian employees passed off as automation, to the collapse of Builder. AI, a $1.5 billion unicorn with AI that was actually outsourced developers. The difference between those who thrive and those who succumb. The ability to transform AI from an existential threat into a competitive advantage through a new key skill, knowing what to ask the machine and when the machine is really a machine. The global AI market in media valued at $25,98 billion in 2024 will explode to $99, $48 billion by 2030. In this scenario of radical transformation, Italy finds itself at a critical crossroads. Print advertising revenue fell by 13, 7% in the first months of 2024, while the rest of the world is accelerating the adoption of technologies that are redefining what it means to be a journalist in the digital age. The great bifurcation, who is laying off, and who is hiring in the age of AI 2024 marked the year of the great bifurcation in the publishing industry. On the one hand, waves of layoffs hit historic newsrooms. Business Insider cut 21% of its staff, the Messenger closed, leaving 300 journalists out of work, while CNN and the Los Angeles Times eliminated hundreds of positions. The roles most affected are copywriters, junior editors, and translators, all easily automatable functions. On the other hand, a new ecosystem of opportunities is emerging. The Washington Post created the first position of senior editor for AI strategy and innovation, while Newsweek launched a team dedicated to AI for breaking news that helped reach 130 million monthly sessions. The job market has seen a 124% increase in AI roles in the media sector, with salaries reaching $30 to $35,000 per year for senior prompt engineers. The key to this transformation lies in the strategic approach. Thompson Reuters invests over $100 million a year in AI, using different models for specific tasks, OpenAI for content generation, Google Gemini for complex legal document analysis, and Anthropic Claude for high-sensitivity workflows. This multi-vendor approach has enabled the company to optimize costs and performance while maintaining control over editorial quality. The art of dialogue with artificial intelligence, the new grammar of journalism. Knowing what to ask the machine is not a slogan, but an emerging professional skill that is redefining the craft of journalism. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly pervasive, knowing how to dialogue effectively with algorithms represents the bridge between journalistic tradition and technological innovation. The evolution of skills, tradition and innovation. Traditional skills are not disappearing, but evolving into more sophisticated forms. A survey of 134 information workers in the US, UK, and Germany reveals that AI content verification sometimes takes longer than manual writing, authors note. I can confirm this. This seemingly paradoxical finding hides a fundamental truth. AI does not replace journalists, but requires new forms of editorial oversight. Relationships with sources, editorial judgment, and contextualization remain irreplaceable. As a British newsroom manager points out, I don't want to be BuzzFeed or CNET putting out junk. We have to do things right. The art of digital questioning, technique and strategy formulating effective questions for artificial intelligence goes beyond simply requesting information. It requires an understanding of algorithmic biases, the ability to structure complex queries, and the skill to iterate to obtain increasingly accurate results. A productive conversation with AI must contextualize, provide the background necessary for an accurate response, specify the format, define whether you want an article, a summary, an analysis, or a verification, set ethical parameters, request transparency and sources and balance in perspectives. Calibrate the tone, adapt the language to the target audience and medium verification as the new frontier. Paradoxically, the AI era has made fact checking even more crucial. Journalists are developing new methodologies for assisted fact checking, where artificial intelligence becomes both the object and the tool of verification. This dual role requires a deep understanding of the limitations and potential of the technology. The challenge is no longer just to distinguish between true and false, but also to assess the quality of automatic summaries, identify significant omissions, and recognize when AI introduces subtle biases into the narrative, the modern journalist must become a digital detective capable of following algorithmic trails and unmasking the hallucinations of machines. Towards a new editorial ethics, the responsible use of artificial intelligence requires constant ethical reflection. Journalists must consider not only what to ask AI, but also how to use the answers obtained. Transparency toward the public about the use of artificial intelligence becomes a pillar of editorial credibility. In this scenario, technical expertise merges with professional responsibility, creating a new hybrid figure, the journalist orchestrator capable of conducting a symphony of human and digital sources to produce higher quality information. It is no longer a question of competing with machines, but of learning to work with them. When AI stands for actually Indians. Before celebrating the success of Ilfolio, it is necessary to reveal one of the most disconcerting secrets of the tech industry. Much of what we call artificial intelligence is actually hidden human labor. The phenomenon ironically dubbed photomotion by experts reveals how many companies use armies of underpaid workers, often in India and other countries, and pass them off as advanced automation. The most emblematic case is Amazon Just Walk Out, the technology that promised cashierless shopping. Over a thousand workers in India manually supervised every transaction, constantly training the system and correcting its mistakes. When Amazon withdrew the technology from its stores in the US, the truth emerged. The miraculous automation was actually an elaborate outsourcing system masquerading as AI Builder. AI, the collapse of the actually Indians Unicorn. The most recent and devastating case comes from Builder. AI, a British startup valued at $1.5 billion that promised to make app creation as easy as ordering a pizza using artificial intelligence. A few weeks ago, the company filed for bankruptcy after fraud emerged. Their AI companion Natasha was actually Indian developers, with no artificial intelligence involved. Founder Sachin Dev Dugal was fired in February, and the company is now under investigation by the Manhattan Federal Prosecutor. Defrauded investors include Softbank, Qatar Investment Authority, and even the World Bank. It's a perfect example of how AI washing can fool even the most sophisticated global investment funds. Advon Commerce, the empire of fake automated journalism at the center of the Sports Illustrated and USA Today scandals is Advon Commerce, a company that turned fake automated journalism into a million dollar business. The figures are staggering. 9,000 articles published through its content management system for hundreds of publications, using completely fabricated journalists with AI-generated profile photos. An internal Advon training video obtained by Futurism shows the reality of the operation. Employees generate an article written by AI and refine it. The company initially used contractors to write product reviews, then used this material to train language models evolving towards automation. It is an example of the transition from human labor to actual AI, with human workers' training machines in a process of gradual replacement. The Google Paradox. When corporate divisions don't talk to each other, the most emblematic case of the complexity of large tech companies emerges from the timeline. On March 5th, 2024, Google announces measures against scaled content abuse. On April 1st, 2024, Google Cloud announces a partnership with Advon to launch Advon AI. When Futurism asked for clarification, Google responded with silence. The search giant had been very willing to talk to us when it announced its crackdown on AI-generated content in March, but when we contacted them several times to ask if the partnership with Advon was legitimate, we received no response. The most likely explanation lies in the organizational structure. Google Cloud operates as a separate division with its own commercial objectives, and Advon AI is positioned as a B2B tool for retailers such as Target and Walmart, not for journalistic content farming. As TechDertz Carl Bode observes, incompetent executives continue to treat AI not as a way to improve journalism, but as a shortcut to creating an automated advertising engagement machine. The Advon case also demonstrates that the same technologies can serve legitimate markets, e-commerce, and problematic practices, fake journalism, simultaneously. The evolution of the model from content farm to enterprise software AdVon is now part of Flywheel Digital, acquired by Omnicom, and presents itself as a provider of SEO and user-centric content solutions powered by AI for Fortune 500 companies. The transition from controversial content farming for news outlets to enterprise tools for e-commerce represents a typical evolution of tech startups. Same technology, different markets, different ethics. I will not simplify the concept further. Spines. The debate on AI-assisted publishing, among the cases dividing the publishing community, is Spines, an Israeli startup offering automated publishing services that reduce turnaround times from six to eighteen months to three weeks, with prices ranging from twelve hundred dollars to five thousand dollars, allowing authors to retain a hundred percent of their rights. The platform uses AI for editing, proofreading, cover design, and formatting while still assigning a human project manager to oversee each book. Criticism focuses on quality. Artificial intelligence is notoriously untalented as a writer, notes futurism, while experienced publishers point out that it closely resembles vanity publishing with an AI twist. However, the startup has attracted $22, $5 million from reputable investors, and CEO Yehuda Niv has a solid track record, having founded Israel's largest publishing house. The model is not necessarily revolutionary. It is self-publishing with AI automation, but it represents the industrialization of services that already existed, potentially democratizing access to previously expensive or slow production processes. When the experiment becomes a revolution, the experiment of Ilfolio, the boldest experiment in Italian journalism, comes from Ilfolio, which published a daily insert written entirely by AI for an entire month. The result? A 60% increase in sales on the first day and international media coverage that brought in new readers. Claudio Serassa, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, admits the limitations. This is one of the cases where AI works poorly in terms of originality, but emphasizes the fundamental lesson. The key thing is to understand what more can be done, not less. Ilfolio's success takes on a different dimension when compared to the reality of the content farm industry. While Sarasa is conducting a transparent and ethical experiment, Newscorp Australia is already producing 3,000 AI articles per week through its Data Local project. Meanwhile, NewsGuard has identified 49 fully automated news websites in seven languages designed solely to capture advertising traffic. The most surreal example comes from Arkansas. OKNWA, the first fully automated local newspaper complete with AI reporters with names like Benjamin Business and Sammy Streets. The site scrapes the web for local events and republishes them under fake AI identities, representing the final evolution of the Advon model. The paradox of responsibility. Does Google reward those who violate its rules? The story becomes even more absurd when you consider that Google, after announcing a crusade against content farm abuse and scaled content abuse, signed a cloud partnership with Advon Commerce, the company at the center of the scandals. While quality journalists like those at 404 Media struggle to get indexed, Advon continues to land on its feet with million-dollar contracts. The result? Sports Illustrated fired en masse after the scandal while Advon got an endorsement from Google. As TechDirt's Carl Bode observes, incompetent executives continue to treat AI not as a way to improve journalism, but as a shortcut to creating an automated advertising engagement machine that literally produces money. The economics of transformation. Numbers don't lie. The economic data tells a story of profound disruption. The global AI market in media is growing at a rate of 24, 2% per year, nearly five times the average growth of the economy. Investment in AI startups reached $209 billion in 2024, accounting for 46, 4% of total venture capital. Meanwhile, the traditional publishing industry is suffering. In Italy, print advertising revenue has fallen by 13, 7%, while the cancellation of the extraordinary publishing fund has meant a loss of $140 million. The impact on wages is dramatic. Roles requiring AI skills command salary premiums of up to 25% in the US. An AI content manager at Amazon can earn between $62,000 and $95,000, while senior prompt engineers can earn salaries of $30,000, $35,000. In contrast, 58% of journalists are self-training in AI without any company support, creating a growing gap between those who master new technologies and those who are left behind. The ROI for those who invest is impressive. Some AI implementations report returns of up to 210%, with production cost reductions of 40 to 60% for standard articles. Automatic transcription reduces turnaround times by 70%, while AI assisted editing can improve publication speed by 20 to 30%. But these numbers hide a complex reality. Only 13% of newsrooms have implemented formal AI policies, leaving the majority in a limbo of unstructured experimentation. The future is already here, but it is not evenly distributed scenarios for 2025 to 2030 range from technological utopia to editorial dystopia. The AI and Journalism Futures project identifies a machines in the middle scenario where AI essentially becomes the newsroom processing and distributing most journalistic information. Experts predict a post-link reality where users will no longer visit publishers' sites, accessing news through AI agents that summarize content. The Paris Charter on AI and Journalism, chaired by Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa, has defined 10 fundamental principles for ethical AI in journalism, emphasizing that technological innovation does not inherently lead to progress. It must be guided by ethics. The EU AI Act, which came into force in August 2024, imposes labeling requirements for AI-generated content, while organizations such as the IFJ and EFJ are fighting to ensure fair compensation and algorithmic transparency. Successful newsrooms are adopting two-speed organizational models that allow experimentation while maintaining traditional workflows. Federalized structures are emerging with autonomous teams supported by centralized AI infrastructure. The key is to maintain a balance between technological efficiency and core journalistic values, accuracy, fairness, accountability, and public service. Conclusion The revolution that requires evolution and transparency, AI is not the future of journalism. It is its turbulent and contradictory present. But the transformation underway reveals an even deeper bifurcation than initially imagined. It is not just about replacing journalists with machines, but about the battle between ethical automation and predatory fault automation. The contrast between Ilfolio and Advon Commerce is emblematic. On the one hand, a transparent experiment that openly declares its use of AI, invests in human oversight, and uses technology to interrogate the future of the craft. On the other, an industrial system of deception that passes off underpaid workers as advanced automation, creates non-existent journalists, and pollutes the information ecosystem with low quality content. Builder. AI proves that even billion dollar unicorns can be built entirely on fault tomation. Bahon dollars. Five billion dollar valuation for Indian developers passed off as AI Companion Natasha. The unexpected resilience of the market. However, comments from the editorial community reveal a comforting truth. Markets have antibodies against scams. As one author observes, there are always scams, but I've never seen one that has had a lasting impact. The reason is simple. Discovery algorithms, which are ironically true AI, reward engagement and reader satisfaction. Content farms can flood the market, but quality always emerges. Don't worry about badly written books, a community veteran wisely suggests. Worry about well-written books written by AI flooding the market. But even here the logic applies. If a book written by AI is really well written and engages readers, perhaps the problem isn't AI, but our conception of what authorship means. Seventy-three percent of news organizations have already adopted AI technologies, but the real differentiator isn't technology adoption. It's the ability to distinguish between innovation and systemic fraud. The final lesson. The newsrooms that thrive are those that, like Elfolio, use AI to free journalists from repetitive tasks and challenge them to focus on what machines cannot do, build trusting relationships, contextualize complexity, and tell stories that touch the human soul. Meanwhile, Google indexes content farms that violate its own rules while real journalists struggle to gain visibility. The final paradox is devastating but also liberating. In the age of maximum automation, honesty becomes revolutionary. Knowing what to ask the machine is not just a technical skill. It is an act of resistance against an ecosystem that rewards systematic deception. But as the wisdom of the editorial community shows, readers can tell the difference. They don't read beyond the first page of a poorly written book, whether it was produced by a human or an AI. Italian newsrooms are faced with a choice that goes beyond technology. They can join the race to the bottom of automated content farms hoping to fool readers and investors, or they can follow Ilfolio's example and use transparency as a competitive weapon. The difference between survival and prosperity lies not only in the adoption of AI, it lies in the ability to maintain integrity, while everyone else pretends that their robot journalists are not actually exploited workers on the other side of the world. In this age of fault automation, authentic journalism becomes the last form of automation that no machine can ever replicate, the automation of trust. And trust, as every good journalist has always known, is earned one story at a time, one reader at a time, one truth at a time. Sources, research and market data, AI and journalism, What's Next? Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, AI in Media and Entertainment, Market Size Share Report 2030, Grandview Research AI Exposed Sectors Experience Productivity Surge, PWC 2024, Global AI Jobs Barometer Case Studies and Scandals, Meet Advon, the AI powered content monster infecting the media industry, futurism AI generated articles are permeating major news publications, and PR Builder. AI's AI was actually Indian workers, now bankrupt. What happened when Italy's Ilfolio newspaper let AI take over? The Washington Post, the photomation phenomenon. Is there a human hiding behind that robot or AI? Scientific American, the AI journalism revolution continues to go poorly. Tech Dirt Sports Illustrated's use of AI infuriates a staff already in turmoil. The Washington Post Content Farms and Automation, new generation of AI written content farms on the rise, the register. This entirely AI generated local news site is incredibly depressing. Futurism News Corp. Australia unleashes AI powered news articles, academic research, artificial intelligence in the news, Columbia Journalism Review. AI research shows automated journalism more trusted when paired with human touch. UF College of Journalism, how we're using AI, Columbia Journalism Review Economy and Trends, Crisis in the Publishing Industry, Metro News AI Job Statistics That Will Shock You in 2024, WEM Global Partnerships and Initiatives, One IFRA and OpenAI Launch Global AI Accelerator for Newsrooms, RSF and 16 Partners, unveil Paris Charter on AI and Journalism. OpenAI and RCS collaborate to improve Italian journalism. Turtles AI Share the Newsletter. Welcome to Electe's Newsletter, English. This newsletter explores the fascinating world of how companies are using AI to change the way they work. 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