The Facebook era of journalism was probably the most like instrumented that journalism had ever been, right? And so I can understand why you would just kind of follow those numbers to see where they would go for as long as you did. So now we're in 2023, the sort of traffic firehose of Facebook and Twitter to the extent it ever was one has slowed to a trickle. This competition for traffic, for audience, for whatever you want to call seems like it's drawing to a close.
A song featuring A.I.-generated versions of Drake and the Weeknd went viral — before being taken down by streaming services. Is censorship of A.I.-generated songs the way forward? Or can singers benefit from synthetic voices, as some artists like Grimes are suggesting?
Then, HatGPT: Kevin and Casey pull headlines out of a hat and generate their own takes on the news.
And Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor, discusses the end of the 2010s digital media era.
On today’s episode:
Ben Smith is a journalist and co-founder of the digital media company Semafor. He was a New York Times media columnist and the first editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.