It has never been cheaper or easier to produce high-quality content.

Foundation models are improving at extraordinary speed. At the same time, the tools built on top of them are becoming ubiquitous and inexpensive. Anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can now generate text, images, video, and audio that would have required a full production team only a few years ago. 

The result is predictable: The Internet is being flooded with AI-generated content. In fact, there is already more AI-generated content on the Internet than human-generated content.

At the same time, the economics of the Internet may be shifting. Harvard fellow Shuwei Fang recently suggested we are moving from an attention economy to an intention economy — a world where systems increasingly try to anticipate and execute what users intend to do rather than simply competing for clicks and engagement.

Taken individually, each of these trends is significant. Taken together, they create something else: an opportunity for trusted media.

Because when content becomes abundant, something else becomes scarce: trust.

Verified journalism matters

The explosion of AI-generated content creates a growing gap in the information ecosystem. As consumers, we will increasingly face questions like:

• What information is verified and real?

• How should I prioritise and sort through the flood of content?

• Am I being shown what I actually want or simply what will push me to take an action? (i.e., monetisable by platforms)

This is where journalism has a role that platforms cannot easily replicate.

At INMA’s recent Agentic AI Master Class, one idea surfaced repeatedly: Truth needs to become infrastructure.

For decades, trust in journalism has often been treated as a brand attribute. Something audiences feel about a publication. But in an AI-mediated world, trust increasingly needs to be embedded directly into the systems that distribute information.

As the volume of “AI slop” grows, accountability and verification become more valuable, not less.

And if media companies have spent years investing in their brands, that investment may become even more important in the next phase of the Internet. Brand becomes a stamp of approval.

Not the only signal, but an important one.

Transparency and acountability

But trust needs to be built and constantly reinforced. It needs to be supported by layers of transparency and accountability.

One interesting example comes from Google’s NotebookLM. The product allows users to consume information in multiple formats — summaries, podcasts, chats, slides, or full articles — depending on what they need in the moment.

But, crucially, it also allows users to trace answers back to the original source material. If they want to go deeper, they can. Transparency is built into the system.

This model points toward an important shift for media: Information should not be trapped inside a single format. Articles, podcasts, newsletters, and explainers are simply different expressions of the same underlying knowledge.

To meet new audience expectations, publishers may need to think more about liquid content — information that can flow into different formats depending on how an individual wants to consume it.

A story could become a podcast, a summary, a visual explainer, a conversation with an AI assistant, or a deep research thread. But the underlying context, sourcing, and editorial logic remain intact. And, importantly, the audience can trace the information back to where it came from.

Compentation and attribution

For this ecosystem to work, however, another layer must be in place: compensation and attribution. Several initiatives are emerging to address exactly this.

The IAB Tech Lab recently launched its Content Monetization Protocol (CoMP), which aims to create technical standards for how content is identified, attributed, and monetised in AI environments. INMA contributed to that work.

Meanwhile, new marketplaces and licensing frameworks are beginning to appear. Microsoft has launched a content marketplace. AWS is expected to follow. Companies such as TollBit and Cloudflare are working on infrastructure to manage AI access to publisher content. And Really Simple Licensing will soon launch its own licensing framework — another initiative INMA has contributed to.

While all of these are early and we don’t yet know how this will play out, this begins to outline a future ecosystem where trusted content can be identified, traced, and compensated — even inside AI systems.

Which brings us back to the opportunity. The Internet is about to produce more content than ever before. But abundance creates confusion. And confusion creates demand for trusted signals.

If publishers can combine brand trust, transparent sourcing, adaptable content formats, and new attribution systems, they may find the AI era does not diminish journalism’s role. It may reinforce it.

Because in a world overflowing with generated content, the question is no longer simply who can produce information. It’s who can stand behind it.

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Banner art: Adobe Stock By Anat art.

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