Mind the Gap: AI and the Future of News in Latin America

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In October, 2025, Aspen Digital brought together leaders and practitioners at the intersection of journalism and tech from across Latin America and beyond for a day of conversation, debate, and information sharing. What emerged was a pragmatic, audience-centered approach to AI: experiment boldly, standardize wisely, and keep humans (including the humans who develop the AI tools) accountable.

Across the different sessions, eight key themes stood out:

Beyond tools, toward transformation: AI is increasingly embedded in newsroom workflows driving measurable productivity. The challenge now is to reach beyond the productivity tools, and approach AI transformation with “head and heart literacy”.
Culture beats tooling: Successful newsrooms that appoint AI leaders, create cross-functional working groups, and provide continuous training for staff tend to adopt AI faster and more safely. AI champions can bridge divides between editors, technologists, and reporters and help to accelerate the responsible use of AI tools.
Distinctive journalism matters more than ever: As chatbot delivered news continues to grow, publishers are investing in the kinds of reporting that only humans can provide: investigative and enterprise reporting, deep analysis, and engagement with communities through dialogue, listening, and shared experiences. Yet even the most distinctive journalism must remain discoverable—a persistent challenge.
User-facing AI products are emerging: Following the initial success of workflow-oriented AI applications, many newsrooms are experimenting with audience-facing tools. These may include chatbots that draw from archives or select databases or AI-generated avatars designed to preserve journalists’ safety. Early indicators are encouraging, but issues of accuracy, cost, safety and reliability at scale remain unresolved.
Strategic alliances will be essential for journalism’s long-term sustainability: Building coalitions that go beyond traditional newsroom boundaries, including community organizations, civil-society groups, cultural institutions, technologists, and digital-rights advocates who share an interest in strengthening the information ecosystem are essential. At the same time, publishers are also building alliances among themselves to strengthen journalism’s resilience.
Rights, revenue, and realism: Consent and compensation for news organizations from AI companies that scrape publisher data remain unresolved. Sector coalitions are pushing for the “3Cs” (Consent, Compensation, Citation). Consent is meant to restore control over when and how news archives are ingested; compensation addresses the asymmetry in bargaining power and ensures that value created by high‑quality reporting is shared; and citation is about preserving brand visibility and driving traffic back to original sources when AI systems surface their work.
Global provenance standards are urgently needed: Global provenance standards are becoming essential. Journalism’s role is not to arbitrate whether every piece of content is AI-generated or not, but to safeguard authentic reporting, expose manipulated media when it appears, and help the public understand what AI can and cannot do.
Sovereign and regional language models are strategic infrastructure: Sovereign and regional language models are emerging as key infrastructure for the information ecosystem. Initiatives, such as LATAM GPT, aim to build an open regional LLM that reflects Latin American contexts and languages, with transparent data-governance practices designed to correct biases imported from models trained elsewhere.

This work is made possible by the Siegel Family Endowment who support this series. Additional thanks for the Patrick J McGovern Foundation. We’re grateful to Media Party for their partnership, especially their founder Mariano Blejman.

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