On Monday evening, Pepa Bueno warned viewers that this edition of Telediario was different. She gave way to images of a fire in a residential neighborhood and hinted to the audience that they might notice something strange. She then revealed that neither that fire nor those firefighters existed, but rather that they had fabricated the sequence with AI. The presenter had the augmented reality layer in her studio removed and made the table and chair disappear. "And me? Am I really me? Well, I'll tell you that during these seconds you have not seen or heard the real Pepa Bueno either." And, suddenly, a second image of her, duplicated, appeared on screen to make clear to the viewer a great existential dilemma: the doubt between reality and fiction, or between truth and lies. "Seeing something on screen is no longer a guarantee of anything," Bueno stated. The second half of Telediario was a special program to delve into the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.The news report warned of the risk of manipulating collective memory by altering past images, or of constructing statements that have never been made. It explained how AI is used in economic fraud, in wars, and in defense strategies, and how cyberspace control worked. All of this was accompanied by a reflection from an ethical perspective, perhaps a bit optimistic. The apocalyptic narrative was balanced by also exposing the benefits of AI in treating diseases, in education, or in culture. To conclude, it speculated on how AI would transform the future by delving into its consequences on our brains and on population control, and by posing in a very elementary way the difficult balance between technology and humanity.It was a different Telediario as they had announced. Experts in the field might consider the informational journey a bit superficial or unoriginal. But it made these reflections very accessible to a very diverse audience not necessarily accustomed to this type of debate. The dissemination is intended for the most inexpert. The Telediario perhaps fell into some very common cliché when reporting on AI, such as resorting to iconography that attributes a symbolic female face to this technology where the brain is replaced by futuristic wiring. Or using distressing images of people obeying a screen like soldiers.But the ability to attribute a volatile format to the news, with an organic fluidity in the linking of themes and with the skill to adjust the forms of narration to the context, was original. The news of the future should no longer be thought of from the studio or the cameras but from the ways viewers look and perceive. Faced with the increasingly blurred line between truth and falsehood, journalism capable of self-explaining is more essential than sophisticated.
