Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak has been imprisoned, and silenced, longer than any other journalist in the world. Over the 21 years that have passed, many efforts have been made to set him free but to no avail. Each year, the silence regarding his situation grows, posing a direct threat to free speech. For this year’s World Press Freedom Day, Pressbyrån, Sweden’s biggest newspaper retailer partnered up with Reporters Without Borders to highlight the issue.

To reignite public opinion regarding Isaak’s situation, we had to push boundaries. By using AI technology and training it with Dawit Isaak's previous work, we were able to recreate his journalistic voice and write a new article. The article considers the importance of free speech. It is based on a dataset containing up to as many as 36,000 words written by Dawit Isaak in both published and censored articles. The material was collected with the help of Reporters Without Borders and fed into an AI platform. Based on a prompt instructing the AI to write an article with the same tone, style, and qualities as those that characterize the work of Dawit Isaak, the article was produced and continuously reviewed by Dawit’s family and journalists who are very familiar with his texts and his journalistic work.

The campaign set off with a teaser on Pressbyrån’s social media channels, supported by DOOH. On World Press Freedom Day, we published the AI-generated editorial article in Dawit Isaak's name in Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Expressen, to make sure that the fate of Dawit is not forgotten. And a controversial reminder that we must never take free speech for granted. The article was also contextualized with an explanation from Expressen's deputy editor-in-chief as to why they chose to publish it editorially – which further reinforced the impact of the AI-generated article.