WE NEWS fakes Indigenous northern 'correspondents' with AI

WE NEWS lists 121 "AI correspondents" on its site, and three of them are presented as northern Indigenous reporters: Kaylee Johns as "a member of Yukon First Nation," Warren Lafferty as "of Dene heritage," and Leah Qammaniq as "an Inuk raised in the North." None of them exist. CBC News reported that the site is owned by AZ Medias Ltd., a company incorporated in Hong Kong with a hosting provider in France; the listed publishing director is David Dragesco, whose contact emails bounce back.

The output is largely rewordings of stories from real northern outlets, paired with AI-generated author portraits. One WE NEWS article about a Yukon shooting drew on sources from Yukon, Oklahoma.

"Suddenly the space [Indigenous journalists] fought so hard to get, the stories they fought so hard to tell are just completely taken away, they're taken out of it, and I think that is very harmful," Kerry Benjoe, interim president of the Indigenous Media Association of Canada, told CBC. She also called it "stealing authority." Tamara Voudrach, executive director of the Inuvialuit Communications Society, described the pseudo-Indigenous bylines as "just another form of colonialism."

The confusion is by design, said Ahmed Al-Rawi, director of Simon Fraser University's Disinformation Project: "The problem is that they actually have a picture of the alleged author of each news article, and that picture is a human, so it's confusing." Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, called enforcement "a game of whack-a-mole." Paul Deegan of News Media Canada was blunter: "The theft is blatant and it's happening on an industrial scale."

Local publishers see it in advertising terms too. Corey Larocque, managing editor of Nunatsiaq News, said an outside AI news source using their content could "take away advertising dollars that could be ours."