Earlier this spring, a new local newsroom appeared in Grand Traverse County seemingly overnight. The site, called Prism News, publishes two to six local stories a day under the bylines of nearly 40 journalists.
But here’s the catch: None of those reporters are human.
Instead of traditional reporters, the site copies and rewrites the work of other outlets through artificial intelligence.
In fact, the Grand Traverse Prism news site is just one of more than 200 AI-generated publications run by Prism across the United States. Prism has one other news site in Michigan, in Iron County.
Those sites can be split into two categories: publications focused on hobby communities (like sourdough baking or bonsai gardening) and local news coverage.
Prism announced its launch in press materials in May 2026, saying “the launch arrives at a difficult moment for American media. There are now 213 counties with no local news source at all, and another 1,524 down to a single outlet. Roughly 50 million Americans live in what researchers call a news desert.”
In that news release, Prism said it was built to address that gap in coverage. How Prism plans to do that — with no original coverage of its own — is unknown.
IPR was in contact with Prism co-founder Daniel Koren and requested an interview multiple times. After repeated requests were turned down, IPR sent a list of questions to Koren. Koren did not respond in time for this story.
Local stories without local reporting
At first glance, Prism’s stories look authentic.
They feature real people, real places and real events from northern Michigan. But unlike a traditional newsroom, Prism's reporting process is almost entirely powered by artificial intelligence.
One person featured in a Prism article is Jonah Ezell, a young chicken farmer in northern Michigan.
“I never talked to anybody at all from Prism,” said Ezell. “I guess they just did their own thing. I got no contact at all with them."
Instead, Prism summarized an existing story produced by UpNorthLive and used real photos of Ezell's farm and details from UpNorthLive’s original reporting.
According to LinkedIn, the Israel-based startup behind Prism has just four employees. Its model, as stated in the launch material, is to create hundreds of local news and hobby sites, automate production and generate advertising revenue at scale.
“It's really just a summary of a story,” Ezell said as he read over Prism’s coverage of his story. “There's nothing else to it.”
Though Prism’s AI largely summarizes reporting already produced by other news organizations, factual errors and discrepancies do appear.
One article incorrectly placed Traverse City in southwest Michigan. Another misstated how much Michigan spends sending children out of state for mental health care. Another stated the wrong reason for why a recall petition was set in motion against Grand Traverse County’s prosecuting attorney.
In Prism’s AI Disclosure, the company explains that “individual articles are not hand-edited before publication (but that) the publication as a whole is supervised by people”. While Prism writes that automated quality and moderation checks are run before publishing, they do acknowledge that “the system can still make mistakes: names can be misspelled, dates can be misordered, and context can be missed.”
How Prism runs human moderation and fact-checking is unclear.
Whether those standards apply to the “AI-illustrated” photos which accompany Prism’s articles is also unclear, in that many photos depict people and places incorrectly.
Those AI-generated photos often accompany real photos taken from other outlets. The captions of photos are the one place real outlets are credited, although that does not always happen.
AI-generated images raise additional concerns
The AI-generated image that accompanied Ezell's story appeared realistic at first glance, but included details that weren't accurate.
The illustration showed Ezell sitting on a hill overlooking his chickens at sunset.
When shown the image, Ezell said it looked close — but not quite right.
“It almost passes,” he said. “The problem is, I don't have any structures like that ... That's just not me. It's not my farm."
Ezell’s photo is less egregious than others. In other AI-generated images, people are depicted as being a different race. Another story on local flooding showed a group of people in a life raft being rescued by sheriff deputies. That did not happen.
Ezell’s AI photo had smaller inaccuracies, but even those can leave readers with the wrong impression.
“If people look at that chicken tractor, and it's a little bit off, like it's really big … people could think that I'm like this really huge guy that I'm really not,” he said. “If you got one or two details more wrong, you could have a completely different opinion on me.”
‘Pink slime’
MediaWise director and Poynter Institute faculty member Alex Mahadevan said Prism is part of a growing network of so-called "pink slime" news sites.
“Pink slime news sites are absolutely not new,” Mahadevan said. “They've been around since before 2016 … but now it is just so easy to set up a pink slime news site, which is a site that's run purely for cheap advertising dollars or to spread political misinformation."
Prism does not appear to spread political information, but that has been common with other pink slime networks. One of the largest, Metric Media, created an estimated 1,200 supposedly local news sites and used them to attack opponents, promote particular right wing political candidates and advance the interests of advocacy groups and corporate clients.
Earlier generations of pink slime sites often relied on algorithms or low-cost labor to scrape and rewrite stories from legitimate news outlets.
Now, artificial intelligence can greatly accelerate that process.
“There's just this fire hose of news stories that they can pump out and then basically post across social media,” Mahadevan said. “When people see it on social media, they just see an image ahead of a line in a deck. They don't know if it's from a credible news site so they're going to click it."
As of 2024, pink slime sites officially outnumbered real local news organizations. Mahadevan said the growth of those sites creates two major problems.
The first is economic.
“It's crowding out legitimate local news,” Mahadevan said. “(Newsrooms) make money and get paid by doing the work. That is going to community meetings, that is going to county commission meetings, that's calling sources, that's spending the time to write up investigations. Sites like this essentially come in, they siphon away clicks, they siphon away ad dollars."
The second reason, he said, is that low-quality, AI-generated stories risk undermining trust in local journalism, historically one of the country's most trusted sources of news.
But maybe the larger issue is accountability.
“Journalism is an extremely human craft,” Mahadevan said. “Think about the number of ethical decisions you make throughout the reporting process, throughout the writing process, throughout the editing process. You are accountable to the people you cover. The machines that are pumping out and scraping your work are accountable to no one.”
IPR has since contacted Prism with corrections to several local stories.
Those corrections have since been made.
This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.
