The Brutal Economics of Liquid Content: “Only organizations with massive scale or premium brand differentiation can survive these economics.” The article? Commodified. “What if news media were to let go of the artifact as the product and productize the process instead?” (Shuwei Fang, Radically Informed)
I'm a journalist who builds stuff. At SPIEGEL, I launched podcasts, led teams, and shaped platform strategies. Now I'm into AI.
Reinforcing competence: AI companies are paying thousands of lawyers, consultants, and other professionals through startups like Mercor and Surge to write out in detail what counts as a job well done in every conceivable context. (Josh Dzieza and Hayden Field, The Verge)
Vibe coding starter guide for newsrooms (Joe Amditis, Center for Cooperative Media)
Sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble: “The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. (…) But AI can’t do your job.”
Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally and has unveiled new AI features as well as new partnerships with news publications. SPIEGEL is one of the partners. (Google)
“The Washington Post last week rolled out AI-generated podcasts, ignoring internal reviews that found errors in AI scripts, like fabricated quotes, and had deemed more than two-thirds of them unpublishable.” (Max Tani, Semafor)
A Kenyan author on the supposed markers of AI-generated text: “The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.” (Marcus Olang’, This Man’s Mind)
To mark ChatGPT’s third birthday, the Guardian’s Robert Booth tours Silicon Valley in search of the future: “Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work.”
Thoughts on ChatGPT apps and why they aren’t mini versions of existing news products: “The entire premise of building a ChatGPT App is to expose capabilities, not pages. This is the existential shift for news orgs accustomed to owning the screen.” (Florent Daudens, LinkedIn)
Slop Evader: A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. (Tega Brain)
In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
