Infobae has incorporated AI into its newsroom teams across its headquarters in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bogotá, Lima, San Salvador, and Madrid.

Fernanda Kobelinsky, journalist and editor of Infobae, was quick to clarify during the recent INMA Webinar Journalism and AI: The Infobae Model, that AI is not meant to replace journalists. On the contrary: “It allows reporters to devote more time to field reporting and frees them from repetitive tasks,” he said.

Based in Argentina, Infobae employs nearly 400 journalists across the six Spanish-speaking countries where it operates, and every newsroom has adopted AI to perform different tasks. 

“AI is like having a well-informed colleague who is always ready to help,” Kobelinsky said.

Infobae’s adoption of AI as a journalistic tool was not the result of laboratory experimentation, Kobelinsky said. Instead, the organisation began using the technology directly within the realities of daily journalism.

The first question that emerged in this process was how to adopt AI without losing what made the outlet valuable: its voice, credibility, and identity, Kobelinsky said.

Another challenge involved adapting the technology to the identity and idiosyncrasies of each country. For that reason, Kobelinsky emphasised every newsroom is staffed with journalists from that country, ensuring the publication speaks the same language as its audiences.

Since 2023, Infobae has implemented AI in all its newsrooms, which makes it an early adopter anticipating the phenomenon that AI would become. 

“The emergence of AI represents the most radical change we have experienced as journalists,” she said. “The arrival of the internet and social media combined were not as drastic as what is happening with Artificial Intelligence.”

One slide from her presentation stated: “For the first time, technology is not only accelerating our work; it has entered the intellectual core of journalism.”

Technology capable of writing

This is no longer merely a distribution platform but something much deeper, Kobelinsky said, because the technology not only speeds up work but also performs intellectual tasks: “For the first time, this technology does what, until recently, only humans could do: write.”

In addition to writing, she said, AI can summarise, translate, generate headlines, and synthesise information — turning it not just into a trend but a true turning point.

Kobelinsky pointed out that AI can also transcribe audio, something particularly useful for journalists. Transcribing long interviews or reports is a task reporters no longer need to spend valuable time on — time that can instead be used for more important and relevant journalistic work.

AI can also translate content into any language and process PDF documents and reports, making it very useful, for example, in data journalism.

No editorial judgment … yet

AI, however, does not possess editorial judgment or a journalistic perspective. It also lacks a reporter’s instinct for news — an ability to determine what may or may not be important or what might be hidden behind an event or a source’s statement.

Nor can it uphold ethical standards or responsibility for content. It cannot verify sources and cannot, on its own, build trust.

Kobelinsky recalled that when journalists first began using AI, fear often arose that the technology could replace them. That concern faded, however, when it became clear AI was an ally that turned writing into a commodity. 

As a result, now the journalist’s value is shifting toward other areas, such as deeper reporting and stronger relationships with human sources and networks of contacts.

“Journalists are the ones who benefit the most — provided they understand what AI can and cannot do,” Kobelinsky said.

Even before Infobae adopted AI, readers had already made their decision, she said. “Readers were already consuming AI-generated summaries or had become accustomed to interacting with tools such as ChatGPT. Competition was no longer just between media outlets, since many influencers were publishing news before traditional media.”

As a result, competition shifted from media versus influencers, media versus newsletters, media versus algorithms, and media versus AI — the latter being able to summarise media content without readers needing to visit news Web sites.

Integrating AI in the newsroom

Three years ago, Infobae’s question was no longer whether it would adopt AI but how it would do so without losing its brand identity and credibility.

In 2023, when many news organisations were still asking what AI was, Infobae began building its own solution — although not exactly with ChatGPT. “We didn’t want a generic tool that flattened our voice or, worse, invented sources or hallucinated,” Kobelinsky said.

She explained that AI did not understand Infobae’s tone or the type of news it publishes. In addition, writing styles differ in every country where Infobae operates. 

“You don’t write the same way in Colombia, Mexico, or Argentina,” she noted, emphasising a generic AI would not help them achieve that goal.

For that reason, Infobae began creating its own AI — one aligned with the brand’s style and, most importantly, governed by the newsroom itself and integrated into the editorial workflow.

That is how Scrib News, an AI-based editorial platform for Infobae, was born in 2023. 

“It is an internally developed platform created by journalists with Infobae’s style,” Kobelinsky said, adding that what began as an experiment in 2023 now has far more advanced versions. “It has also become the laboratory for the company’s cultural transformation,” she said.

The tool is available in the Web browsers of more than 400 people who make up Infobae’s newsrooms across different countries and offers more than 50 functions. It also draws on different AI engines, such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity AI, selecting the most efficient model depending on the task. 

“We are not tied to any single provider,” Kobelinsky said.

Easy to use

Regarding the tool’s use, Kobelinsky explained the learning curve for journalists is virtually zero. As soon as a user logs in, the technology recognises the country they are in and automatically loads the linguistic style for that country. In addition, the interface and operation are highly intuitive.

As journalists use the tool, they identify new needs and detect errors, which they communicate to the development team so the platform can continue evolving.

One notable feature is the availability of specialised chats and assistants, including one focused on gastronomy. This makes it possible to create content about a Peruvian ceviche, a Mexican taco, or an Argentine barbecue.

There are also assistants for court reporting, crime coverage, and sports. These will be particularly useful during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, as they can follow matches live, minute by minute.

The tool also accounts for the semantics and grammar of each country, including verb conjugations and tenses, which differ, for example, between Spain and Latin America.

Another section allows journalists to generate content from virtually any type of source, such as a document, audio file, or video. The tool helps organise and structure the information and can even propose a headline. It also optimises content for SEO, adds bold formatting, and suggests photo captions.

Another feature enables AI-assisted photo searches, either within the company’s own database or through contracted agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press, or Agence France-Presse. Beyond that, journalists can request specific characteristics of the photo or the subject they are looking for.

The system processes, writes, and exports content to the CMS with minimal intervention from the journalist, although editorial supervision remains in place before publication. 

“An interesting aspect of the tool is that it is integrated with the CMS, so journalists don’t have to copy and paste or move between different platforms,” Kobelinsky said.

The tool can also generate original video. At Infobae, it is mainly used for evergreen topics such as science, history, health, and wellness, but not for breaking news.

The results of implementing the tool are reflected in increased efficiency when producing simpler stories. It frees journalists from repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as transcribing video. “It gives you time to do journalism,” Kobelinsky said.

These tools do not replace editorial judgment but rather amplify it, she emphasised. The question is no longer how many words per hour a journalist can produce but the quality of the final result, always under the responsibility of the journalist.

Adopting AI is not a technological challenge but a cultural one. From a human perspective, there may be fears of replacement, passive resistance, and the inertia of “we’ve always done it this way,” Kobelinsky said.

The goal, she said, is to move from an AI that assists to one that audits the editorial product, but that’ll be another story.

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