A journalist using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate an article is like a chef in a restaurant serving you a reheated ready meal from a supermarket. It’s fundamentally phoney. This is true even if the contents of the article happen to be accurate – because the journalist doesn’t really know whether they are true or not.

Anyone I know who has worked with Peter Vandermeersch has a very high opinion of him. From 2019 until last year he was one of the most influential people in Irish media, first as publisher and then as chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland. The Belgian company publishes the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Belfast Telegraph, the Sunday World, Sunday Life, The Herald and 11 regional newspapers.

Vandermeersch’s job was to make those titles fit to survive in the digital era. Anyone who cares about democracy and the diversity of information and opinion that keeps it alive would recognise that this is more than a business imperative. It’s a political, social and cultural obligation.

Vandermeersch is no cub reporter. He’s 65. He was a foreign correspondent in Paris and New York before serving as editor in chief of the Brussels-based newspaper De Standaard in 1999-2010 and then of Amsterdam-based daily NRC Handelsblad in 2010-2019. He’s a sophisticated, cultured and thoughtful man who knows pretty much everything there is to know about journalism. Which makes what happened to Vandermeersch last week rather hair-raising. He was suspended from the position he was given after he stepped down from the Irish operation last year as “Journalism and Society” fellow – essentially Mediahuis’s in-house intellectual.

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