February 25th, 2027

Now that deepfake and generative AI technologies have advanced, news outlets have started to utilize them in their reporting.

It has already become popular for people to use the likenesses and voices of real news anchors to deliver false and often extreme statements. Now, news organizations are seeking to use their likeness whenever they wish so they can have the face and voice without having to pay a reporter’s salary.

This has brought up concerns of both news outlets and individual creators using deepfakes without permission of the people they were based on. More and more reporters and public figures have been turning to technologies such as AntiFake to prevent the use of their voices, while others have developed means of detecting deepfakes. There has also been movement to pass laws restricting the use of deepfakes or requiring permission for a person’s likeness to be used in one.

Outside of visual media, generative AI has also been used to write scripts and articles in place of human authors. While initially promised to be a tool to help journalists, it has instead replaced them, with AI able to generate articles far faster than a human could.

Despite lawsuits alleging that AI were trained on stolen content and protests from reports and writers who are losing their jobs, this practice is projected to continue.