Artificial intelligence and the Information space
A trust crisis
Generative artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the production and distribution of information. Creating a manipulated picture or drafting a convincing false text has become available to anyone. The internet is already flooded with fully generated “news sites” and deepfakes. Even when there is no malicious intent, generative artificial intelligence is not flawless: it hallucinates, thereby spreading false information and potentially ruining the media outlets’ reputation.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy, artificially fabricated from human created content, leading to a deepened trust crisis. News media are struggling to survive economically in this context: they compete against artificial content for attention and advertising money. Similarly as with social media platforms, the large AI companies operate with little transparency or accountability, yet transforming our global information space.
At the same time, AI provides opportunities to transform public interest media and access to reliable information. This requires reliable, transparent and responsible systems as well as capacities to use them adequately.
Our work on this theme
Background Report: Workstream on Safeguarding Access to Reliable Information in the Age of AI
The Partnership for Information and Democracy (PID) launched, in February 2026, a workstream on Safeguarding Access to Reliable Information in the Age of AI, under the leadership of the governments of Luxembourg, Ukraine and Spain, and in collaboration with interested States of the PID.
The workstream takes stock of the challenges and opportunities AI poses to the media and to trust in information, critically evaluating this paradigm shift in power dynamics between big tech and journalism. It will provide concrete policy recommendations to safeguard the reliability of information in the age of AI.
Its first output is a background report, mapping the existing economic and epistemic challenges to public interest media in the age of AI, a look at the global state-of-the-art on tackling these subjects, and proposes ways to think about policy formulation and the road ahead.
Ads for News, News for Ads｜The role of government in reforming the digital advertising market
As the world is still grappling with the threats of disinformation, public interest media’s sustainability keeps eroding. In its latest policy brief, the Forum on Information and Democracy calls for a structural reform of the online advertising market to reroute part of its revenues towards trustworthy news sources.
The policy brief entitled Ads for News, News for Ads provides recommendations to governments which have a direct responsibility in ensuring the condition for a fair online advertising market. Recommendations encompass immediate, actionable steps such as incentives for advertisers or mandating a media exception in programmatic advertising.
OSCE Policy Manual｜Safeguarding media freedom in the age of Big Tech Platforms and AI – in partnership with the Forum on Information and Democracy
This Policy Manual highlights how the current digital information ecosystem — dominated by Big Tech platforms (very large social media and search engines, and increasingly also AI companies) — has become increasingly captured in ways that undermine media freedom. It underscores the need for democratic state intervention, based on the rule of law, to ensure an enabling environment for independent and pluralistic journalism.
The Manual offers a vision for healthy online information spaces, where the availability and accessibility of public interest information are ensured. It puts forward mitigation measures and key recommendations for States to implement long-term structural reforms and sustained investments to address the distortions in today’s online information ecosystem.
The recommended mitigation measures cover three key areas:
• Visibility of journalism and public interest information online
• Media viability and funding models that support public interest information
• Vigilance, or the online safety of journalists
The core of this Policy Manual lies in the guidance it provides on how to enable healthy information spaces online by freeing the ecosystem from heavily concentrated gatekeeping power, and instead fostering an enabling environment for media freedom in the algorithmic and artificial intelligence (AI) era.
It concludes that for media freedom to be safeguarded, addressing platform-related challenges alone is not sufficient. Instead, it calls for more ambitious structural reforms — to move beyond merely mitigating media dependency and towards building an independent, pluralistic online information and media landscape that can sustain democratic debate and societal resilience.
This publication is part of the project “Healthy Online Information Spaces – SAIFE Renewed”. It was produced in collaboration with the Forum on Information and Democracy.
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