Quick verdict:
The claim that “AI will soon wipe out journalism as a profession” is highly exaggerated.
Current research suggests that AI will automate some newsroom tasks and reshape workflows, but is far more likely to function as a powerful assistive tool than a full-blown replacement for human journalists.

What do studies and experiments show?

• UN-related reports and academic studies on “AI and the future of journalism” highlight that algorithms can write basic updates, summarise data and produce routine reports, but warn that over-reliance on automation risks undermining investigative reporting, local coverage and editorial independence.
• A recent communication study explicitly asks whether AI should be seen as a replacement or a complement and concludes that AI is best understood as a support system that extends journalists’ capabilities when embedded in strong editorial and ethical frameworks.

When a major Italian newspaper produced an entire experimental edition with AI-generated content, the result exposed AI’s limitations:

• factual errors,
• unoriginal or repetitive phrasing,
• passages that bordered on plagiarism,
  forcing human editors to step in as fact-checkers and gatekeepers.

What can AI realistically do in the newsroom?

• Draft short, formulaic news items (stock updates, sports results, weather, basic corporate earnings).
• Search and structure large document sets for investigative projects, highlighting patterns or anomalies for reporters.
• Support headline testing, SEO optimisation and audience analytics.

However, AI still lacks:

• On-the-ground presence – talking to sources, sensing mood, building trust.
• Deep contextual and ethical judgment about what matters, to whom and why.
• Accountability – the capacity to stand in front of the public and assume responsibility for editorial decisions.

These elements remain firmly human responsibilities.

Where is the real risk?

The danger is less that AI will kill journalism, and more that:

1. Media owners may use AI as a justification to cut staffing and hollow out newsrooms to the bare minimum.
2. Automated content systems might flood the information space with unchecked machine-generated material, worsening misinformation and deepfake problems.
3. News organisations could become dependent on opaque tech platforms that control the underlying models and training data.

For this reason, European research projects focus on journalistic autonomy in the age of communicative AI, calling for transparency rules, labelling of AI-generated content and clear editorial oversight.

So what does the future likely look like?

• Some routine jobs will shrink or disappear,
• but new roles will emerge:
  • data-driven investigative reporters,
  • AI editors who supervise and correct automated outputs,
  • specialists who audit algorithms and defend newsroom standards.

Bottom line:
AI will not “replace journalists” in a simple one-to-one way; it will transform journalism. The key question is who controls the technology and under what rules, not whether humans are still needed.