Daniel J. Gervais (Vanderbilt U Law) has posted “Automating the Fourth Estate: Artificial Intelligence and the Governance of Democratic Knowledge” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Democratic governance depends on institutions that produce, circulate, and contest public knowledge under conditions of accountable human judgment. Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping those institutions from within, introducing what this article terms epistemic automation: the substitution of human judgment in the generation of publicly authoritative knowledge by computational systems optimised for scale. Taking journalism, and specifically the institutional conditions of quality journalism, as a paradigmatic case of democratic epistemic infrastructure, and intellectual property law as an analytical lens, the article argues that governance frameworks oriented toward informational outputs, rather than the conditions of their production, risk aligning silently with the dynamics of automation and displacing the institutional arrangements that sustain democratic knowledge. It advances a human-centred alternative in which accountable epistemic agency retains institutional significance independent of output quality, and develops an institutional mechanism, editorial certification, to preserve that link.