February 19, 2026, Commentary by Johnny Fraser for the Seward Folly

AI isn’t journalism, but it’s changing how we know our world

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Editor’s note: The first in a series examining the emerging media sphere and how the
Seward Folly, and many of Alaska’s new local news outlets, are entering uncharted
territory. Media is now consumed in new ways. Readers need new literacies to sort
signal from noise, fact from fabrication, and local reporting from content generated far
away.

People recently mocked the current Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, because she referred to artificial intelligence as “A1,” the steak sauce. Within minutes, ridicule spread across the world, carried by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, Threads, and even the platform formerly known as Twitter, reaching the Southeastern Kenai Peninsula and Tasmania at the same time. The pile-on was global and instantaneous. The robust laughter held a quieter lesson: many people still don’t know what “AI” is or means. And the more dangerous lesson is that people who don’t know what something is will be judged harshly for asking.

In 1791, the Bill of Rights included the 1st Amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The United States Congress passed laws governing a permanent army under civilian control in 1789 and 1790. Leaders at the time, including Benjamin Franklin, argued that if a democracy keeps a standing army, its soldiers must understand the freedoms and the constitutional system they have sworn to defend. The founders believed that people could not fight for democracy if they did not understand the nation’s values and history. That central idea of what an Army needed helped inspire the idea of the museum as an
educational tool, one that could connect military service to the country’s civic ideals and
shared heritage at a time when universal schooling and literacy were unheard-of notions.

And remarkably, the Alaska Constitution, unlike those of the founding 13 colonies, enshrined public education as a public right.

Over the past 250 years, the country has argued about the promise and the risk of free speech and what constitutes public literacy. Cheap broadsheet printing in the late 1800s
made it easier to share ideas, and even easier to spread rumors and falsehoods for political gain. The First Amendment protected this slop on broadsheets because the founders believed democracy depends on informed citizens, not censorship. As printing gave way to the internet in the early 2000s, we now live in a world of widespread self-publishing, opinions before facts, and a growing volume of misinformation alongside great tips for power tool safety and how to hem your pants.

This is typical of any technological change. Calculators for tests, laptops in schools, and steam engines were all blamed for bringing an end to civilization. Rapid change in
information technologies led to mixed feelings about social media. Past social media misinformation may have influenced election results or conspiracies that people dislike. And everyone is blaming the tool for how it was used and how people were deceived. Today, the rise of artificial intelligence is now the latest tool cast in that role.

Unfortunately, this technology now has a direct impact on local news that is akin to the rise of the printing press.

Journalism in a changed information ecosystem

Local news now lives inside a vast unregulated digital stream. Readers encounter the Seward Folly’s local reporting alongside memes, influencer videos, corporate media,
political messaging, listicles about the top 10 ways to pack for a vacation, and
algorithmically generated content based on what they just clicked on. At the same time,
some new companies and venture funds are moving into the local news media, purchasing local papers, cutting assets and reporters, only to replace original content with centrally manufactured material, some of which is produced without regard for accuracy or local utility. Researchers have called these outlets the “zombie press.” And the most insidious of these gathers local advertising and subscriber dollars to support distant owners’ lifestyles while readers receive generic or agenda-driven content unrelated to local reality.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this trend. Text-generation systems can produce
plausible articles, summaries, and commentary at scale. The result is a flood of convincing-sounding material that may have little connection to events on the ground. For communities like Seward, trying to sustain local ethical journalism, this creates a new challenge: distinguishing reporting rooted in place from content manufactured
elsewhere.

What these systems actually do

Despite dramatic language, today’s AI systems are not thinking machines. They are statistical models trained on enormous collections of human-created data. They are
“trained” on books, websites, articles, code, and more. From that training, they learn
patterns. Their code allows them to predict which words tend to follow others, what structures resemble arguments or stories from their training set, the compressed language of that training set as a universal language that does not have regional nuance or language variants, to produce phrasing that sounds authoritative. For example, an AI is more likely to call a snowmachine a snowmobile.

When asked a question, a language model generates text by predicting likely sequences of words given its training and the prompt. It does not verify facts in the way a reporter does. It does not know whether a statement is true. It produces language that resembles what truthful language often looks like.

This distinction matters. When information is missing or ambiguous, these systems may
generate material that is incorrect or entirely fabricated, but written in a confident tone. That is a phenomenon researchers call “hallucination.” The output sounds persuasive
because the model has learned the style of credible writing, not the ethics or methods of
journalism. Readers may enjoy reading Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky as a great example of convincing language that is about as meaningful as an AI hallucination, but he wrote that in the era of political disinformation appearing on printed broadsheets.
click for Jabberwocky

AI and the Folly’s News Readers

The rise of convincing machine-generated content means readers increasingly encounter material that appears factual but has no reporting behind it. Images, quotes, and narratives can be produced without witnesses, sources, or events – narratives and opinions that do not meet the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, the concepts that are supported by any reputable news service. To read more: https://www.spj.org/spj-code-of-ethics/

On the internet, ethical journalism’s reporting of facts coexist in the same feed as computer-generated fiction and political speech that twists facts beyond recognition. For a local outlet like the Seward Folly, this moment carries both opportunity and responsibility. Our reporting is created by Seward’s residents for the people of Seward. But our news reaches readers in the same channels where AI content circulates freely.

Trust in local journalism now depends not only on accuracy, but on readers’ ability to recognize how information is produced.

Artificial intelligence will not end civilization. But it is reshaping the media environment in
which communities understand themselves. In that environment, local reporting grounded in lived reality becomes more valuable. And fortunately, with local news, everyone can walk outside, talk to their neighbors, discuss an issue at the grocery store, and take the time to verify facts with the folks we trust around town.