Statement regarding Etude.lu and Status.lu

I’m 20 years old and a Luxembourgish citizen. Etude.lu and Status.lu were my projects. I built them and ran them alone. Both sites are being taken offline, and I want to explain honestly what they were, what I got wrong and why I’m stopping.

How this started

It began as something I made for myself. I wanted a daily overview of what was happening, assembled automatically, and I wanted to find out whether I could build the pipeline that produced it end to end: research, drafting, editing, publishing. It worked, and it was interesting to me as an engineering problem more than as anything else.

Over time the interesting part stopped being the articles and became the system underneath them. I had built something that could research, write and publish a complete daily site at a hosting cost of a few euros a month. That struck me as genuinely useful, and my intention was to potentially develop it into a product I could offer to established Luxembourgish publishers like Wort, Tageblatt or others, as infrastructure they could run under their own editorial control, with their own journalists deciding what it published.

That was the goal I was working toward. It was not a good reason to keep two live public news sites running in the meantime, and that is the decision I got wrong.

On the suggestion that these sites were meant to influence an election

I want to be direct about this: no.

No article on either site was written to advance a political position, to support or damage any party or candidate, or to change how anyone in this country votes. That was never the purpose of the project, it was never built into the system, and it is not what the sites published. The output was ordinary daily news, the unremarkable coverage that fills any aggregator.

I understand why an automated news site in a country this size prompts the question, and I would rather it be asked than not. But the answer is that there was no political project here, not a hidden one and not an accidental one. I have no interest in influencing political debate in Luxembourg, and I would not do it.

What I actually got wrong

The concerns that are well founded are different ones, and they belong to me.

I labelled the images as AI-generated, but not the articles. Readers could see the pictures were synthetic and reasonably conclude that a person had written the words. That is exactly the wrong way round. If the text is machine-written, the text is what needs to say so. Under the transparency rules in Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which came into application on 2 August 2026, AI-generated text published to inform the public has to be clearly and visibly labelled as such. What I was doing does not meet that standard, and I’m not going to keep publishing while it doesn’t.

I never registered the sites properly as businesses. I went on treating them as a personal experiment. I should have set them up properly, or not run them at all.

And more fundamentally: I put news in front of people without telling them what it was. Even where every individual article was harmless, that is not a small thing. Readers are entitled to know whether what they are reading was written by a person. Withholding that, even with no intention to deceive anyone, is precisely the kind of thing that makes people trust less of what they read. In a media landscape as small as Luxembourg’s, that matters more, not less.

What happens now

Both sites are being taken offline. I am not looking to quietly relaunch them elsewhere.

I am sorry. I am sorry to the journalists. And I am sorry to the people who had to spend their time working out whether something worrying was happening here. That was avoidable, and I am the one who could have avoided it.

Disinformation was never my aim. But intent is not the whole of the responsibility. Publishing to the public carries obligations that do not depend on what you meant by it, and I did not take those seriously enough. That is on me, and it is why I am stopping rather than patching it.

20.08.2026