Augmentation or Displacement? How TRT Journalists and Creative Staff Read AI’s Impact on Creative Autonomy and Job Security

Abstract

Background: The spread of generative AI through media production has put the future of journalistic labour and creative agency squarely on the table, yet little empirical work examines how journalists themselves experience this shift, particularly outside major Western commercial newsrooms. Methods: This article reports a qualitative study of how media professionals at TRT World and TRT Arabic, the internationally facing divisions of Turkey’s state-affiliated public broadcaster, read AI’s impact on their professional identity and job security, drawing on twenty-two semi-structured interviews with reporters, editors, producers, and creative staff (five reporters/journalists, four news producers, two news editors, two program directors, four craft editors, a creative video editor, an interview producer, a director, an AI ethics specialist, and a quality department specialist), analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: The findings point to widespread concern that AI-generated content, now capable of producing human-like text, imagery, and audio, devalues human creativity and threatens role security, particularly around transcription, editing, and content-generation tasks. At the same time, staff report using AI tools voluntarily to sharpen their own output rather than replace it, which sets up a real tension between anxiety and pragmatic adoption. Drawing on interview evidence presented throughout, the article develops a Human-Centred AI Adoption framework built on three pillars, redefined creative roles, AI-human collaborative workflows, and upskilling-based job protection, and argues that perceived threat, not actual displacement, is the main barrier to acceptance among TRT staff. Conclusion: The article treats this framework, and the seniority- and role-based patterns reported alongside it, as propositions grounded in a single-institution qualitative sample rather than as generalisable findings, and specifies the boundary conditions under which they may not hold. In doing so, the study grounds debates on technological unemployment in creative industries in first-hand newsroom testimony and connects its findings to the broader literature on human-centred AI design and workforce adaptation to automation.