This is odd. They have the budget to run with real journalists and outlets. Is this some reverse-psychology move? Where they want people to see that its AI and thus not take it seriously? What aim does that achieve?
There's a reason why the public distrusts journalists more and more. Many people still think the problems are limited to domestic journalism, and haven't connected the dots yet w.r.t. that foreign policy journalism is just as bad, if not worse.
The public just distrusts large organizations now because those large organizations haven't been effective with their stated missions.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?