Jessica Bruder is a non-fiction writer specialising in immersion journalism, exploring subcultures and social issues. Her New York Times-bestseller book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century has been published in 24 languages. It was the first American book to win the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage. It was also a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the J Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award.

Nomadland was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, featuring real people playing versions of themselves from the book. Bruder is also the author of Burning Book and, with Dale Maharidge, Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance. Her work brings to light the lives of those on society’s margins, telling stories of resilience and change.

In a conversation below during the Lahore Literary Festival 2025, Bruder talks about immersion journalism, the impact of AI on the field and the ethical dilemmas of AI-generated content. Excerpts:

he News on Sunday: How do you think AI will shape the future of journalism, especially in terms of disinformation and bias?

Jessica Bruder: AI is an amplifier for many things. I feel that disinformation has always been a problem. But the scope and scale of disinformation when AI gets involved is really scary. It is the same thing with surveillance. For example, the idea that an authoritarian government can use AI to monitor vast amounts of data that once had to be tracked manually is terrifying. We’ve already seen this in the US with AI-driven policing efforts.

I mean, where does it end? That’s the real issue. You can’t get anything new by feeding questions into a system that just regurgitates and spits out content it has cannibalised from the past. In reporting, we’re supposed to constantly refresh the available knowledge by going out into the world and bringing information back from reality. Instead, AI risks turning journalism into an echo chamber, bouncing the same recycled information off the walls. I think that’s a huge problem. And AI, by design, tells people exactly what they want to hear. It reinforces biases. But then again, that also happens with some journalists. It’s not just an AI-specific problem.

I’ve seen this firsthand with journalism students. I’ve been teaching at Columbia University Journalism School on and off since 2008, and I remember how different the approach to reporting used to be. My generation is accustomed to calling people on the phone – cold calls. You just call people, or you just go somewhere. Right?

But many younger journalists didn’t want to do anything that didn’t involve Googling and were very resistant. I kept telling people, look, the amount of information on the internet is finite, and it is the map, not the territory. It is a reflection of what is out there. But you want to go out in the world and contribute to the map, not just regurgitating things other people have seen. That’s segregation, curation and just a different thing altogether.

TNS: As AI blurs the line between real and fake, will we soon be unable to tell the difference?

JB: I worry that people will accept AI as a substitute for real information, just as they have done with misinformation. Because they don’t really know, they just take everything as reality. We lived in an era when people thought photographs could be trusted. Of course, images have always had the potential to contextualise events, but they have also been manipulated. With AI, this becomes an even bigger issue.

Right now, you can sometimes still tell [if something is fake] because, for example, somebody has six fingers on one hand. There will come a time when those imperfections disappear; when that happens, it won’t be cute or funny anymore. I feel like I’m already seeing it. Just correcting people and saying, no, that doesn’t exist. That’s AI. People are like, oh, look at this cool mushroom or look at this cool bird. I’m like, that is not a bird. That is a bunch of pixels. That’s something reconfigured to look like a bird that doesn’t exist in the world. And that’s scary. It is going to become rarer and rarer to understand what AI is and what it is not.

What media literacy is today is different from what it will be tomorrow. It will also be harder and harder to be literate about what AI is and what it is not. And that gives a lot of control to a few people. Looking at the world – especially in the US, where I live – it’s already so economically and socially polarised. AI only deepens that divide in ways that are not just frightening but also deeply disappointing. I mean, can’t we do something about it?

There’s just long been this belief that technology - it’s almost a religious belief - that technology is a force of nature and we just need to get out of the way. I just think that it’s fallacious and corrosive. Frankly, it serves the economic interests of only a few.

I mean, I do not believe that it should be legally acceptable for something with as much profit potential as ChatGPT to train on the backs of so many artists and writers.

AI risks turning journalism into an echo chamber, bouncing the same recycled information off the walls. I think that’s a huge problem. And AI, by design, tells people exactly what they want to hear. It reinforces biases.

TNS: Do you find the speed of change unsettling?

JB: I worked on Nomadland for three years. I spent countless nights in a tent, often in the cold, and weeks on the road. I drove 15,000 miles, mostly alone in a van, travelling across the US and following people around. That’s a completely different experience from just typing a prompt into a system and saying: give me a book.

Do you know what I mean? Even for me, there’s this almost childlike frustration – like, that’s cheating, right? And it’s not just that it feels unfair; it’s that the process is qualitatively different. You can’t tell stories from the front lines of reality if you never leave your desk.

Maybe I’m a dinosaur, and yes – it is scary. Part of the challenge is the sheer pace at which things are happening. It’s a deliberate system overload until everything collapses. And the scary thing is – it works.

TNS: How does immersion journalism compare to traditional reporting?

JB: Immersion journalism involves spending significant time with people before writing about them. By engaging with them in their environments, I can better understand and describe what I see, rather than observing from a distance. This is something AI simply cannot replicate because it requires an embodied, real-world approach to reporting. It is often called participant observation as it combines tools from both journalism and anthropology. The idea is that by spending time with people rather than just parachuting in, you can get to know them better and share their stories in a way that’s more authentic.

When I was reporting on Nomadland, people would say, Oh, now you’ve become a nomad. I would tease them and say, No, I am a faux-mad – like the French faux for false. The idea is that you get close, but you’re still an outsider. You don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve become another person.

In the US, there’s a writer named Ted Conover, who went undercover for a year at a prison in New York, working as a corrections officer. The US was locking up more and more people, and he wanted to help readers understand what their tax dollars were supporting. The idea was that these deeply flawed systems serve as proxies for us as a society.

I think it’s also a very tangible, humanistic thing to do. The idea that spending time with other people is worthwhile, that things that may from a distance be easy to exoticise are actually quite mundane when you see them up close. The idea that people who look like strangers may seem more like neighbours once we connect with them and allow readers to connect with them through our writing.

TNS: How did Nomadland’s journey challenge traditional views on identity and relevance?

JB: Nomadland started as a magazine piece. It was a cover story for Harper’s, and I had never written for them before. I got the assignment and found myself out in a tent in the Arizona desert, panicking as I tried to find my story.

The exciting thing is that you don’t always know what they [the stories] are when you’re out there. And that’s wonderful because that’s true to reality. But it’s also terrifying when you’re on the ground because you don’t know what you’re going to get. But I think it’s honest in that you can be surprised. When we go out into the world, we have some idea that a story might be there – otherwise, we wouldn’t know where to go. But at the same time, we have to keep an open mind and adapt to the reality of the circumstances.

And that adaptation is a big challenge. So, I just followed the story as it unfolded, and it went from a magazine cover story to a book to a film that featured people from the book. That was incredible. Suddenly, people I had been following for three years were acting for the first time alongside actors like Frances McDormand.

To me, one of the most exciting things about that was how it defied the idea that people are limited to a single role. So, for example, I’m a journalist. You’re a journalist. Somebody’s a singer. Somebody’s an actor. The idea is that our productive roles define us all and that at some point, we age out and we’re not relevant any longer, and then we die.

In my mind, the fact that these people who I’d written about had been essentially cast out of traditional housing and the economy, were older and, in this later part of their lives, got the opportunity to act for the first time alongside legendary actors and killed it. To me, that really was a great kind of way to break down the myth that people are only one thing and then irrelevant. Do you know what I mean? It was a powerful rejection of ageism and the rigid boxes society places people in.

The interviewer is a staff member