Every country has news consumers—and news avoiders—who are media illiterate. OJ-UGANDA’s media literacy section exists to change that. Follow along.

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It was the kind of mistake no newsroom wants to make—and one discerning readers will take long to forget. Kenya’s oldest newspaper, the Standard, printed an article about Tanzania’s embattled President Samia Suluhu Hassan complete with an AI chatbot’s guiding questions still in the text. 

A moment of digital carelessness, perhaps, but it does raise uncomfortable questions about what is happening behind newsroom doors in the age of AI-assisted journalism. Have editors allowed AI to assume full editorial control while pretending it has not? Do journalists still read what they publish?

AI is doing the heavy lifting without the journalists telling their audiences that it does. This is the real problem, not the fact of using AI. When you use AI and keep it a secret, you are undermining your trustworthiness. 

If the Standard was some obscure news outlet, maybe few people would pay attention to what it did. But we are talking about a newspaper with a history of 123 years. The Standard is older than the BBC. It is much older than Al Jazeera, CNN, CGTN, TRT World, etc. The key difference is that it is a national news outlet but with influence beyond Kenya’s borders.

In its heyday, it was—as our earlier news report noted—the second-largest newspaper in Kenya after Daily Nation and by extension the second-largest in East and Central Africa. It should, therefore, have robust editorial quality control systems even as it is going through a sticky patch, like other newspapers.

But a closer look at the article the paper published strongly suggests that it was not reviewed by editors before publication. If they did, they either did the job in a slipshod manner or did not know what they were supposed to do.

For example, the journalist who wrote the article referred to the presidents of Tanzania’s neighbours as Samia Suluhu Hassan’s colleagues. They are not. She does not work with them. She works like them and in a different country, which means they are her counterparts.

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A copy editor with a decent command of the English language would be able to spot that. The journalist also wrote that President Hassan had called two presidents so that they “advice” her on how to deal with post-election violence, which has reportedly claimed hundreds of lives. Again, this suggests the article did not get a proper editorial review because this is a basic grammar mistake even people with elementary English can spot.

The Standard’s AI chat debacle raises one more important question, which is at the heart of transparency in newsroom operations. Is the Standard upfront about how it uses AI in the newsroom? 

Perhaps if this editorial lapse had not become public knowledge, the paper would still claim its journalists do all the writing. But this development conclusively proves they do not.

The paper’s website says nothing about its editorial policy, so it is hard to tell how it operates. But the Standard is not alone in using AI in editorial operations while pretending everything is done by journalists. Across the world, some newsrooms now use AI for copy editing. They share press releases with AI chatbots and wait for ready-to-publish stories. They use AI to summarise dense reports. Yet their About Pages, for those that have them, say nothing about the use of AI in editorial work.

AI is doing the heavy lifting without the journalists telling their audiences that it does. This is the real problem, not the fact of using AI. When you use AI and keep it a secret, you are undermining your trustworthiness. 

And given the misinformation and disinformation all over social media, the last thing news outlets need is news consumers raising questions about their trustworthiness. News consumers need to know they have a trusted alternative—and that trust is built when news outlets tell their audiences how they operate.

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🔴 If you care about truth, credibility and understanding how journalism really works, media literacy is essential. Follow OJ-UGANDA’s media literacy section to sharpen your news sense and separate fact from fiction. Media literacy is your weapon against misinformation, manipulation and media distrust.