The AiDitor at the ORF: Ethnographically Investigating Communicative AI as Actor in the Newsroom

A growing body of scholarship across disciplines has documented the transformation of journalistic work and public discourse in the context of digitalization. Research on platformization, datafication, and algorithmic personalization has demonstrated how digital infrastructures in and around newsrooms shape the distribution, visibility and consumption of news, influence editorial decisions, and reconfigure audience engagement. Against this backdrop, the deployment of communicative AI in newsrooms marks a new phase in media development – one in which AI systems are not merely mediating but also actively co-producing news content.

My PhD project intends to investigate the case of the AiDitor, an AI system developed by the Austrian public service broadcaster ORF, integrating foreign services such as OpenAI models. The focus lies in understanding how the AiDitor transforms journalistic practices, addressing questions of technological governance, journalistic identity, synthetic media, and the negotiation between human and machine agency in the production of public knowledge. In doing so, the ethnographic case study aims to contribute to broader debates on the implications of AI in public service media, as well as on the entry of private tech companies and their technologies into core institutions of democratic control.