AI makes history: Italy's Il Foglio publishes first fully AI-generated newspaper

Il Foglio, Italy's conservative-liberal daily, has launched a month-long experiment with an AI-generated edition to highlight artificial intelligence's impact on journalism

At a time when news media houses worldwide are challenging artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for using their content without permission, an Italian newspaper has claimed to make history by publishing an edition entirely produced by AI.

 

Il Foglio, Italy’s conservative liberal daily, has embarked on a month-long experiment to demonstrate AI’s impact on journalism and daily life. The four-page broadsheet edition of the newspaper will be available on newsstands and online from Tuesday, according to a report by The Guardian.

 

Il Foglio is known to propagate a conservative view in politics and a liberal view in economics.

 

The newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, stated that the edition was fully created by AI—from writing the articles to crafting the headlines. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony,” he said. Cerasa added that the role of journalists would be limited to “asking questions [to an AI tool] and reading the answers”.

 

Features of the first edition

 

The first edition features articles on topics such as US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Italy’s economy. The stories appear to be clear, well-structured, and free of grammatical errors. However, notably, none of the articles contain quotes from humans. On page 2, there is a story about “situationships” and how young Europeans are avoiding steady relationships. The last page includes AI-generated letters from readers to the editor, with one asking whether AI will make humans “useless”.

 

“AI is a great innovation, but it doesn’t yet know how to order a coffee without getting the sugar wrong,” reads the AI-generated response. 

What is Il Foglio?

 

Il Foglio is an Italian newspaper, meaning “The Paper/Sheet” in English. It was founded in 1996, the same year Italy assumed the presidency of the European Union Council, by Giuliano Ferrara, an Italian journalist, television host, and politician.

 

Ferrara shifted ideologically from far-left to neoconservatism. He served as a government spokesman in the first-term government of Silvio Berlusconi in 1994. Berlusconi, a media tycoon, also led the government.

 

Despite opposing what Ferrara described as a leftist cultural regime, the newsroom included left-leaning journalists, such as Adriano Sofri, who was convicted of planning the assassination of a police chief in 1972, as reported by Reporterzy.

 

Since 2015, Claudio Cerasa has been Il Foglio's editor.

 

A glimpse into AI-powered journalism

 

Cerasa highlighted that the new AI experiment serves as a testing ground to showcase how AI could work “in practice”. He stated that it remains to be seen what the future impact of this technology will be on journalism.

 

Despite the edition being entirely AI-generated, Cerasa urged readers not to see it as “artificial” but as a product of intelligence—one that may soon reshape how news is produced.