Marking intersubjectivity in human-written and AI-generated editorials published in "Il Foglio"

In March 2025, the Milan-based broadsheet Il Foglio launched Il Foglio AI, a month-long experiment featuring a daily four-page supplement entirely generated by large language models (LLMs). Owing to the success of the experiment, the project has continued as a weekly feature since April 2025. Each edition of Il Foglio AI contains around 25 articles spanning diverse journalistic genres, including editorials, which form the focus of the present analysis. The paper compares human-written and LLM-generated editorials from Il Foglio and Il Foglio AI, examining the use of authorial stance markers to analyze how intersubjective positionings are conveyed. To this end, the study draws on Martin and White’s (2005) taxonomy of four “engagement” meanings typically expressed by markers of intersubjectivity. The analysis is particularly relevant for the description of AI-generated texts as a new textual typology, as LLMs lack experiential grounding and cannot hold attitudes, beliefs, or judgments. The dataset comprises two subcorpora of 25 editorials each, published between April and May 2025 in Il Foglio and Il Foglio AI.