The AI, Media & Democracy Lab has just been awarded a grant by the SIDN Fund which will enable us to work together for the next two years with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), Waag Futurelab, and publications De Correspondent, and Follow The Money to investigate how European news organizations can reclaim agency over their digital publications from the dominant Big Tech structures of search engines and AI overviews.
image by Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 /
Ever since the onslaught of LLMs and AI tools permeating online platforms and services, many of those in media industries worldwide have come to accept these technologies as a new standard and unquestioned part of digital workspaces. As a majority of this software is being developed by a handful of Big Tech giants in the US, the dependence of journalists on centralized, opaque, and proprietary infrastructures comes into conflict with their democratic watchdog role and the leverage the industry enjoys through its pluralism. The most pertinent structural example currently causing major traffic losses for online journalism has been Google’s introduction of AI overviews, which heavily disincentivizes users from reading articles directly on websites by instead providing them with (often misleading or incorrect) summaries of content generated through unauthorized scraping.
This is where our collaboration intervenes: by working with fellow researchers, journalism industry professionals, and audiences, we will be investigating how open-source and locally developed LLMs can be implemented to improve distribution of and access to the rich digital content and archives of De Correspondent and Follow the Money through a public-facing interface. In this way, by developing options that are tailored to local contexts, organizations will be enabled to build more direct relationships with their audiences rather than relying on connections mediated by social media or one-size-fits-all AI models.
Under the umbrella of the overarching question of reducing dependence on non-European digital infrastructure and technology, 7 other projects were awarded grants by the SIDN Fund, with research spanning in the areas of healthcare, legal frameworks, tailoring generative AI to Dutch language and culture, and much more. The aim of the theme call was to ensure that economy, society, and democracy can benefit from technologies that are aligned with public values, have increased control over affairs, and benefit from solid infrastructure that is not vulnerable to unstable geopolitical situations.
We are eager to begin collaborating on this project, with its full title “Digital autonomy that fits: Tackling the organizational, and audience requirements of media organizations transitioning to open-source and European LLMs” in fall 2026, and will be sharing updates, insights, and recommendations as they become available through our channels on LinkedIn, Bluesky, our newsletter, and this project page.
