LETTER FROM ROME

Since Tuesday, March 18, an unusual supplement was sold with every print edition of Milan's liberal daily Il Foglio on Italian newsstands. None of the 20 or so articles published each morning have a writer. All are preceded by the words: "Text produced with AI (artificial intelligence)." No more human names, no more bylines, but, between the lines, there's the shadow of an invisible anonymous machine capable of moving from an analysis of the speeches of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Tesla's financial results and reports on various European art exhibitions.

Every morning, we can hold in our hands the intriguing, disturbing object that is a newspaper without a journalist. "The idea is to take artificial intelligence from a gaseous to a solid state! To be able to touch it, to make it tangible!" said Il Foglio's director, Claudio Cerasa, 42, who has been at the helm of the singular journal of opinion – an editorial object rather to the right without lacking in pluralism, since 2015. Proudly displaying a European flag on its front page every day, Il Foglio claims a certain irreverence, occasionally assuming a few bouts of dandyism.

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