A Vatican communications official warned Tuesday that artificial intelligence-generated news sites are flooding the digital space with material that threatens democratic stability and diverts advertising revenue from investigative journalism. Dr. NataΕ‘a Govekar, theological-pastoral director of the Vatican's Dicastery for Communication, said more than 3,800 websites worldwide were producing news entirely through AI without human oversight.
Speaking at the SIGNIS World Congress in Kigali, Rwanda, Govekar said these sites "saturate search engines and social media feeds with thousands of articles per day" while capturing a growing share of online advertising spending. "This means that resources are being diverted from investigative, constructive journalism and directed to algorithmic intermediaries and pirate platforms," she said.
The mechanics of "AI poisoning"
AI-driven content farms are designed to attract traffic, not pursue truth, Govekar said. "They represent a threat to democratic stability." She described the spread of automated content as "AI poisoning," contaminating the data used to train AI systems and contributing to "a degradation of culture, a trivialization, a commodification."
She cited the case of "Nicola Andrizzi," presented on a website as a journalist covering the Italian province of Trento - except Nicola Andrizzi does not exist. He is just a prompt, "a command line sent to the chatbot by an automated system."
AI is quietly reshaping human language
Govekar referenced a study of more than 7,000 hours of conversations from over 800,000 podcast episodes. It found that words favored by ChatGPT had increasingly appeared in spontaneous human speech. "These results show how AI shapes human language quietly," she said. "Its lexical choices are entering spontaneous spoken communication." She raised the question of whether patterns of thought generated by chatbots could enter daily life as AI spreads into education, therapy, and other fields.
A call for an ecology of communication
Govekar said the concerns around AI cannot be reduced to technical regulation. Quoting Pope Leo XIV's message for the World Day of Social Communications, she said, "The challenge is not technological but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding our self."
She called for an "ecology of communication" grounded in the principle that "truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence." Technology should be neither demonized nor idolized, but used to protect human relationships and serve the common good. She warned that social media algorithms that maximize engagement and profit weaken people's ability to listen and think critically while increasing polarization. Pope Leo had explicitly urged people "not to renounce our ability to think."
Govekar stressed that no computational system can replace human conscience. "Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history," she said.
For PR and communications professionals, the implications are concrete. As AI-generated content farms grow and algorithms shape public discourse, the ability to maintain trust and authenticity in communications becomes harder. Understanding how these systems work and how to navigate them is no longer optional. The AI for PR & Communications resources at Complete AI Training offer strategies for dealing with these challenges. More targeted support is available through the AI Learning Path for Media Relations Specialists, which addresses the specific issues raised by the Vatican official, from automated news to algorithmic distortion of media landscapes.
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