OTTAWA – Quebec correspondent “Geneviève Tremblay” — who has been reporting on multiple news stories a day lately — seemed to be experiencing a glitch.
She wasn’t the only one. All of We News’ reporters and editors seemed to be malfunctioning on Friday, sending out error messages whenever The Canadian Press tried to ask them questions via chat.
That can happen when your “journalists” are — like the virtual staffers at We News — just fake personas generated by artificial intelligence.
AI has infiltrated news media in Canada and around the world. In early September, Nunatsiaq News published a story about an AI persona posing as an Inuk journalist in Nunavut — one of many personas used to repurpose work from legitimate news sources, including The Canadian Press, for We News.
The site describes itself as a “round-the-clock news portal covering Canada and the world.” But while it remains online, it appears to have been delisted from Google’s search results.
In late September, the story of “Daniel Robson” emerged. Canadian news outlets pulled his work from their websites after being told Robson appeared not to be a real person.
Policy Options editor-in-chief Les Perreaux was the first to sound the alarm in Canada. In an online post on Sept. 24, Perreaux wrote that an editor at Türkiye Today contacted him to ask him to vouch for Robson — and he realized he couldn’t.
“The key moment where my heart sank was when the Turkish journalist told me that Daniel Robson refused to do a video call,” Perreaux said in an interview.
Perreaux said he reviewed the correspondence and material Robson sent and spotted signs of AI product. He said the bigger issue was the attempt to deceive news editors and readers, while AI merely acted as an “accelerant.”
“AI is definitely part of the story, but it’s a smaller part than the deception part where there was a human behind this, pretending to be someone he’s not, or at least refusing to be who he really is,” he said.
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In a story published on Sept. 29, Türkiye Today said the purpose of the Robson persona seems to be to attack Moroccan dissidents.
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We News isn’t hiding its use of AI and clearly labels its “journalist” profiles — including photos of what appear to be human beings — as AI generated.
The AI personas at We News, which include grey-haired editor-in-chief “Gordon Halloway,” repurpose international, national, provincial and local news in more than 100 cities across Canada.
The Canadian Press did attempt to reach a human behind the site, but the contact email address listed on the site bounced back.
When the AI detection company Originality.ai analyzed just over 200 articles by “Geneviève Tremblay,” it identified them as AI-generated.
Originality.ai CEO Jon Gillham said the articles were rewritten versions of stories published by legitimate news media outlets like CBC, CTV, CityNews, Global and the Montreal Gazette. The Canadian Press also found its own reporting among the sources.
“I think industrial-scale AI slop (sites) like this one run the risk of degrading the trust in the news,” Gillham said.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to Canada. On Sept. 17, the U.S.-based website Futurism published a story about Brown Brothers Media, a company Futurism said bought up legitimate news sites and flooded them with AI-generated content — and claimed to pull 50 million page views a month.
Ahmed Al-Rawi, a professor of news, social media and public communication at Simon Fraser University, said sites with fake AI journalists are trying to monetize content.
“A lot of players, whether they are bad players or just profiteers, people who are really trying to get money, are exploiting the hard work of real journalists in order to repackage news content,” he said.
Al-Rawi said social media platforms “should also be blamed for enhancing the popularity of these fake websites.”
Western University assistant professor of journalism Chris Arsenault said it’s difficult to regulate these websites.
“You can get a free or very cheap AI model to pump out this kind of nonsense, and you can always find somebody to host it,” he said. “So it’s a very hard thing to legislate around or to respond to in terms of effective policy.”
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Paul Deegan, president of the publishers group News Media Canada, said while news content is covered by copyright, it’s very difficult for publishers to sue.
“It’s expensive, it takes a long time, whether or not they are in fact in Canada,” he said. (We News says it’s based in Hong Kong.)
News Media Canada is calling on the federal government to state publicly that it does not intend to introduce a broad exception to copyright law for text and data mining.
AI Minister Evan Solomon’s office said in a media statement that “Canadians deserve to know when the information they consume has been generated or altered by AI.”
“Generative AI can be a useful and powerful tool, but Canadians should not be deceived by content that impersonates journalists or conceals how it was created,” the statement said.
Solomon’s office pointed to a recently-concluded consultation on AI transparency and said it recognizes “the concerns raised by journalists and other creators about consent, compensation, attribution and transparency when their work is used to train AI systems.”
There may be no silver bullet to solve the problem, but Arsenault said there is one antidote: old-fashioned reporting.
He noted the “Daniel Robson” case came to light because “of an old-school editor in Turkey who had the temerity and good sense to just, God forbid, pick up a telephone and do some basic journalism, just do some due diligence on a would-be contributor.”
Futurism reported on Sept. 30 that the Brown Brothers Media sites now appear to have stopped publishing and were delisted or significantly downranked by Google.
In Canada, We News also appears to have been delisted. When The Canadian Press searched for the website using Google’s search engine, it got no results — but the site immediately popped up as the top result on another search engine.
Google did not directly answer questions about whether it has delisted We News from its search results, when it may have done so, and whether that was the result of news coverage about its AI “journalists.”
A spokesperson said in a statement the company’s policies for search and Google News “prohibit producing low-value content at scale to game our ranking systems.”
“While we generally don’t comment on individual sites, we act on policy violations to keep 99 per cent of search visits spam-free,” the spokesperson added.
Deegan said it’s in Google’s interest to “make sure that when people go to Google for information that they’re getting accurate information … For them to de-rank and remove these sites that are clearly involved in theft makes sense.”
But Arsenault questioned whether Big Tech companies should be “playing hall monitor and being arbiters of truth.”
“They have a role to play in taking down stuff that’s clearly untrue … But I don’t know if we want them making those editorial judgments.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 3, 2026.
Can’t be any worse than the real ones
““I think industrial-scale AI slop (sites) like this one run the risk of degrading the trust in the news,” Gillham said.”
Haha too late… Nobody trusts any main stream media anymore.
Sort of like your “journalists”…. Right?
The news is still probably more real than anything CBC is reporting.
@ 1:05 Anonymous – Why do you think Karadeglija isn’t Canadian? She went to Carleton, has a position at the Manning Foundation (an institution that is ideologically to the right of the Fraser Institute) and writes for the Canadian Press.
Are you a racist? Or just a troll?
And there it is – the pathetic attempt by dumb Canadian journalists pretending to have uncovered their own use of AI brought to their attention by a not Canadian journalist.
Global, why is this story in the ‘Entertainment’ category?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the engines inside chatbots. LLMs can not distinguish between correct and incorrect statements. They merely parse words based on frequency. This is oversimplified, but if you ask a chatbot what 3×4 is you could get 7 as a result if there are more statements using 3+4 than 3×4 in its training. They just mimic what they are fed like parrots with a large vocabulary and an authoritative tone.
Chatbots are merely an interactive, unverified Wikipedia.
Totalitarianism is established in two ways, by force or by subversion. The frog in the pot approach is what the Liberals have opted for in their push toward a totalitarian controlled Canada. They create bills that, alone do not take away our rights and freedoms but each one chips away at our freedoms, until they give the Liberals complete control. During all of this they remove any chance of rebellion by disarming lawful firearm owners. Then they take away any chance of dissent by installing AI to control the language by controlling the media. It is a slow slide to 1984.
With AI creating the news that the government wants 1984 is a certainty with complete control of the narrative and thereby the population. That is the end of democracy and freedom and the enslavement of a nation.
Canadians don’t get the true news now from Mainstream Media maybe we will with AI journalism
Big deal. Most of the left leaning people don’t know how to read so they are using AI to read news articles.
Maybe we will get the truth for a change.
Keep going with AI and you will get more retards.
Better AI than the reetards
The sooner all news fabricators that go by the misnomer “journalists” are unemployed the better.
It will be a happy day when we see you all homeless on the street.
Well, at least the journalists will be intelligent!
AI news reporting is white washed and emulates the downward trend of journalism. I recall Daily mail’s coverage of the Palisades fires and a caption beneath a photo reading, “Thousands of vehicles have been destroyed in the Palisades fire”, showing a rear camera angle of a barbie jeep “Bentley” on a sidewalk. Had AI understood perspective and scale, it would have know that wasn’t a real car.
There’s a better chance the fully “AI journalist” will gather and report a more even story. A story that doesn’t picks sides and simply let’s the audience conclude their analysis without already being coaxed towards an intended conclusion
Just more AI slop.
This is an article about the excessive use of AI for reporting news but it is filled with the most common and clearest indicator of AI use: the ” — “.
I would think that such a respected news outlet like yours would use traditional punctuation.