Press Council Says AI Cannot Replace Journalists’ Verification as Complaints Pass 1,000

Indonesia’s Press Council, Dewan Pers, has warned newsrooms that artificial intelligence can help journalists process data and produce stories but cannot stand in for verification. Council member Rosarita Niken Widiastuti, who chairs its commission on partnerships, inter-agency relations and organisational infrastructure, made the point at a media literacy event in Yogyakarta on 14 October, according to a statement Dewan Pers published on 16 October.

Niken said the council’s guidelines on AI use in journalistic products require human involvement through the whole production process. “AI can help us, but don’t hand everything over,” she said, stressing that information online is not necessarily true and that flawed data fed into machine learning will produce flawed results, the familiar garbage-in, garbage-out problem. She cited the case of an Australian consultancy whose advice to government was, in her account, based on faulty data, which hurt it legally and reputationally.

The warning comes as the council’s workload climbs. Niken said Dewan Pers received 1,286 complaints last year and has already passed 1,000 this year, with the social affairs minister, the agriculture minister and energy minister Bahlil Lahadalia among those who have lodged complaints. She linked the rise to the growing number of outlets, problems with ethics-code compliance and better public understanding of media literacy.

What it means in practice

The stance fits a wider national debate over who is accountable when machines produce public information. It echoes Yusril’s argument that AI accuracy confers no authority and humans stay responsible, and it sits beside the law minister’s pledge to protect journalistic copyright from AI crawling, which tackles the other side of the newsroom-AI relationship.

For editors, the practical test is simple: AI can speed up data analysis and personalisation, but every AI-assisted story still needs a person who checked it. The council is also promoting journalist competency tests, known as UKW, which it describes as a nationally standardised professional benchmark that regional governments can help organise.

What to watch: whether the council publishes complaint rulings involving AI-generated errors, how Indonesian newsrooms disclose AI assistance to readers, and whether complaint numbers keep rising through the end of the year.