From Al-tieob to Artificial Intelligence: A Continuing Libyan Cultural Experiment
Newspapers, magazines, websites, and cultural platforms in different parts of the world are increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence in drafting, editing, summarizing, analyzing, and producing visual content.
Souad Khalil | Libya
The growing presence of artificial intelligence in journalism and cultural media has opened a new chapter in the relationship between technology and editorial work. Newspapers, magazines, websites, and cultural platforms in different parts of the world are increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence in drafting, editing, summarizing, analyzing, and producing visual content. These experiences differ in their approaches and in the roles they assign to AI, but they all point toward a transformation that is gradually reshaping the contemporary media landscape.
I have previously written about the experience of the Italian magazine Saturno, which introduced artificial intelligence into its editorial structure and gave it a defined role within the magazine’s work. That experience was particularly interesting because it went beyond using AI merely as a technical tool and raised broader questions about the future of editorial work, the relationship between human editors and intelligent systems, and the possibilities and limits of such a partnership.
Al-Tieob and Artificial Intelligence: How a Libyan Website Tested the Future of Cultural Journalism
(Al-Tieob | Ramez Ramadan Al-Nuwairi – Director and Editor-in-Chief of Al-tieob)
Since its launch in 2000, Al-tieob has been associated with an early attempt to bring Libyan literature and culture into the digital space, at a time when the experience of establishing websites in Libya was still in its early stages. Over more than a quarter of a century, the website has maintained its presence in the Libyan cultural and literary scene, keeping pace with the transformations of digital media, from traditional websites to social media platforms and, eventually, the age of artificial intelligence.
In the second half of 2024, Al-Tieob began a direct and organized experiment in using artificial intelligence tools. This experience expanded significantly throughout 2025 and 2026, until AI technologies became part of many stages of the website’s editorial and production processes.
Today, after nearly two years of continuous use, the Al-Tieob experience can be regarded as one of Libya’s early experiments in employing artificial intelligence within digital cultural and media work.
But what matters most is not the technology itself, but how it is used, the limits established for its use, and the role that the editor and writer continue to play in producing published material.
From a Digital Experiment to an Artificial Intelligence Experience
Al-Tieob’s transition to the use of artificial intelligence was not a break with its history. Rather, it was a natural extension of an idea that had accompanied the website since its foundation: keeping pace with technology in the service of culture and literature.
A website that chose, as early as 2000, to establish a presence on the Internet could hardly have treated artificial intelligence as a phenomenon unrelated to cultural and media work.
The experiment began gradually, with the testing of tools for specific tasks, and then expanded over time to include editing, summarization, text analysis, the preparation of interviews and biographies, book and magazine reviews, as well as the production of images and visual posts. By 2025, the use of artificial intelligence at Al-Tieob was no longer a limited experiment; it had become an integral part of the content-production cycle.
2025: Artificial Intelligence Enters the Newsroom
The year 2025 can be considered a major turning point in the experience.
All the news published by Al-Tieob during 2025 and up to the present has gone through a stage of drafting and editing with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This does not mean that the news has become “automated news,” or that the website receives information and simply asks a machine to publish it.
The distinction is important.
The news story begins with information, a source, a statement, or an announcement. AI tools then assist in transforming the raw material into a more organized journalistic text by identifying the essential information, drafting the introduction, arranging the details, eliminating unnecessary material, suggesting a headline, and restructuring the text according to the inverted-pyramid model.
Human review comes afterward, and this is the stage that gives the text its final editorial character.
Here, the philosophy of Al-Tieob’s experiment can be summarized in a clear statement: Artificial intelligence helps formulate the news story, but it does not assume responsibility for publishing it.
Why Was News a Suitable Field for the Experiment?
Cultural news work requires dealing with large quantities of data and texts on a daily basis.
There are announcements about seminars, book releases, exhibitions, lectures, theatrical events, poetry evenings, cultural activities, and the work of cultural institutions and centers. Much of this material arrives in the form of lengthy official statements, while readers need quick answers to the essential questions:
What happened?
Where did it happen?
When?
Who participated?
What is the significance of the event?
Here, artificial intelligence has demonstrated its usefulness as a tool for accelerating editorial work, particularly in repetitive tasks that require reorganizing information more than generating new knowledge.
Long Articles: From Reading to Summarization and Analysis
Al-tieob has also used artificial intelligence tools to condense long articles and subjects.
This function may seem simple at first glance, but it is actually one of the most sensitive tasks, because summarizing a cultural text does not mean simply deleting half of its words. It means identifying its intellectual structure. A good summary must preserve the central idea, the main themes, and the position adopted by the writer without turning it into a text different from the original.
Through the experiment, it became possible to use artificial intelligence to prepare summaries of different lengths, extract the main ideas, identify the subjects discussed in the text, and then make use of this information in preparing journalistic material or presenting the article to readers.
Artificial Intelligence as a Second Reader
One of the most important aspects of Al-Tieob’s experience is that artificial intelligence has not been used only to produce texts, but also to read and analyze them.
This point deserves attention.
When a lengthy opinion piece arrives at the website, it can be analyzed from multiple perspectives before a publication decision is made.
Does it correspond to the nature of the website?
Does it belong to the cultural and intellectual field in which Al-Tieob is interested?
Does it contain generalizations or harsh judgments?
Does it contain hate speech or incitement?
Does it contain offensive language directed at individuals or groups?
Does it express a direct political position that goes beyond the nature of the platform?
Are there claims that require verification?
Is there a problem with the structure or language of the article?
AI does not answer these questions as a “final judge.” Rather, it helps the editor view the text from additional perspectives. From here emerged an important use of artificial intelligence within Al-tieob: pre-publication editorial review.
Analyzing Opinion Articles and Publication Policy
During 2025 and 2026, analyzing opinion articles with artificial intelligence became one of the regular areas of the website’s experience. This use is not intended to impose a particular opinion on the writer, nor to exclude texts simply because they express a different point of view. Instead, it is intended to examine whether they conform to the website’s publication policy and standards.
Here one of the most sensitive questions surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in journalism emerges: Do we use it to make decisions, or to help human beings make decisions?
In the Al-tieob experience, the answer clearly leans toward the second option. The editorial decision remains human, while artificial intelligence provides an additional reading that may reveal points that were not apparent during the initial reading.
Interviews: Artificial Intelligence in Preparation and Editing
The use of intelligent tools has extended to journalistic and cultural interviews.
An interview requires several stages before publication: preparing topics and questions, organizing the material, reviewing the answers, selecting the headline, extracting key statements, and drafting the journalistic introduction. Here, artificial intelligence has helped in preparing, editing, and organizing interviews, particularly when dealing with long and complex texts.
Yet there is one rule that cannot be crossed: artificial intelligence should not invent words and put them in the mouth of the interviewee.
Editing is one thing; fabricating an answer is something entirely different.
Therefore, the use of artificial intelligence in this field remains linked to the original interview transcript and to human review, which ensures that the meaning is not altered and that a position is not attributed to the interviewee that they never expressed.
Biographies: Re-presenting Cultural Memory
Another area in which Al-tieob has benefited from artificial intelligence is the writing of biographies of cultural figures and prominent personalities.
This function is particularly important for a website concerned with literature and culture, as biography represents a means of preserving cultural memory and introducing figures who have contributed to literary, artistic, and intellectual life.
Artificial intelligence can help organize information, rearrange chronological stages, prepare an initial draft, extract works and achievements, and present a biography in a clearer structure.
However, this task has also revealed one of the most important limitations of artificial intelligence: the information it provides is not infallible.
This is particularly important when dealing with Libyan figures, as digitally available information may be limited, scattered, or inaccurate. This is a reality in a context where biographies of many cultural figures are scarce and their information is distributed across websites and social media platforms.
Therefore, knowledge of the local cultural scene and verification of information remain essential elements.
Book and Magazine Reviews
Artificial intelligence has also entered the field of reviewing books and magazines, which differs in nature from news reporting.
News requires accuracy and concision, whereas a book review requires reading, understanding, and analysis. Artificial intelligence can be used to extract the themes of a book, discuss its ideas, analyze its structure, identify its main areas, and raise critical questions about it. It can also be used to read issues of magazines, extract their subjects and most prominent materials, and then construct a review that gives readers a concise picture of the contents of an issue.
Here, artificial intelligence does not simply become a “review writer.” Instead, it can act as an assistant reader, enabling the editor to test ideas and raise new questions about the material.
Read: When Artificial Intelligence Enters the Newsroom
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Souad Khalil, hailing from Benghazi Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
