Machines review: AI writes better than humans at new media outlet

Ingeniøren, a Danish tech outlet, asked three leading language models to review Projekt Y, a new Danish AI-driven news outlet led by Michael Dyrby, a former news chief at TV2 and former editor-in-chief at BT.

An editorial note added after publication changes the picture. Y contacted Ingeniøren and said the article originally reviewed was in fact one of the few pieces on the site that is not AI-generated, but written by hand. Ingeniøren therefore asked the models to review three other articles, plus excerpts from Y's liveblog on the Israel conflict.

Reader comments reflect that correction. One commenter said the piece fell flat once the review was changed following Y's complaint, though he still called the idea fun. Another reader noted that the episode raised a different question: how journalists can send out material with poor grammar and misunderstood proverbs, a flaw he felt the three AI reviews had underlined. One reader asked how the models would rate Ingeniøren and Version2 by comparison, and another wished a European model had been included among those used.

The piece matters as an early test of how AI systems assess AI-produced journalism in Denmark. It also shows how hard it is to tell machine-written from human-written copy, since the first article chosen turned out to be human-written.