Generative AI in authoritarian Turkey’s field of journalism: enhanced efficiency, amplified precarity, and new imaginaries at work

Abstract

This article examines the integration of AI tools into journalistic practice in Turkey, a media field shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring and deepening authoritarian capture. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography (2023-2026), a purposive survey (n = 72), and 30 semi-structured interviews with journalists and academics, we argue that AI does not disrupt Turkish journalism from the outside but is absorbed into its already precarized conditions, characterized by amplifying economic dispossession, labor disposability, temporal intensification, deskilling, and state-regulatory coercion. Our central contribution is the concept of generative precarity. Drawing on Isabell Lorey's theorization of governmental precarization and Natalia Roudakova's framing of journalism as moral practice, we argue that the politically imposed scarcity of truth in authoritarian settings does not merely silence journalists but it also produces critical imaginaries through which journalists renegotiate the meaning, ethics, and purpose of their work. AI tools operate at two levels in this process: at the everyday level, they generate new practices and imaginaries around efficiency, autonomy, and pedagogical renewal; at the structural level, they function as a vantage point from which journalists make deeper reflections on the moral and ethical codes of the profession. This research contributes to the growing body of work on AI and journalism as well as AI and work by emphasizing the need to situate technological change within its political-economic contexts and demonstrating that efficiency gains that AI promised do not resolve labor precarity but amplify it.