This Campaign Gives Imprisoned Journalist an AI Generated Voice

Pressbyrån and Reporters Without Borders highlight the importance of free speech again this year on World Press Freedom Day, the 3rd of May. For this year’s campaign, they have used AI to return an interim voice to Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak, who has been imprisoned without trial in Eritrea since 2001. 

Using ChatGPT-4, Pressbyrån and Reporters Without Borders have recreated Dawit Isaak’s journalistic prose in an article highlighting the importance of press freedom in an age when it is more important than ever before. Thanks to a collaboration with the national newspaper Expressen, one of Sweden’s leading news dailies, the article will also be published digitally and in the paper’s print edition on the 3rd of May. 

“At Pressbyrån, we have worked for more than one hundred years to bring the free press to people all around Sweden, so highlighting the importance of press freedom today is one of the many ways we can nurture that legacy. Using AI felt like a highly relevant and exciting way to shine a light on this critical topic. We have also been very keen to involve and include Dawit Isaak’s family, who have given their permission for the project,” says Lennart Schultz, marketing and communications manager at Pressbyrån and Reitan Convenience Sweden.  

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 which characterise 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. 

“Producing this text has been an emotional process. Reading the AI-generated results after having been able to read Dawit Isaak’s original pieces and feeling how the new text captured his spirit was overwhelming and huge. It feels like a great honour to be able to address such an important issue in this way,” say creators Stephanie Moradi and Caroline Andersson at Åkestam Holst NoA.  

“There is a lot that can be said about AI and the huge challenges it poses in terms of press freedom, for example, but being able to return the voice of a journalist who has been imprisoned and gagged for almost twenty-two years felt huge. No other journalist in the world has been imprisoned as long, and yet today we can hear his voice,” says Erik Halkjaer, chairman of Reporters Without Borders. 

Pressbyrån is offering a fifty-percent discount on all newspapers and magazines in store on World Press Freedom Day this year, the 3rd of May, with a share of the profits going directly to support the work of Reporters Without Borders. In addition to the article’s publication in Expressen, the campaign will be visible in print format, on outdoor advertisements and on social media.