Next month, The Media Leader will head up north for The Future of Media Manchester – part one of our two-part flagship event series, with the other held in London in November.

While there, we’ll be looking to unpack an industry in flux. How is AI changing the media market? What’s next for social platforms? And for brand discovery? How can we supercharge investment outside London?

Ahead of the conference, Jack Benjamin caught up with one of the speakers who offers a unique view on our industry.

Professor Andy Miah is chair in science communication and future media at the University of Salford. He is a bioethicist, an academic and an expert on how technology is shaping our media environments and, in turn, who we are and how we interact with each other in society.

Miah and Benjamin discuss the ways in which AI has the power to transform media (for better and for worse): how AI slop is taking over our TikTok feeds, the ethics of chatbots and whether business incentives are aligning with social incentives for technological change in media.

"The ethics of it certainly can't be left to the platforms to decide," says Miah. "We certainly don't want to restrict innovation to such an extent that it cannot progress, but I think we have the beginnings of a global conversation on how to regulate AI."

Highlights:

2:37: How new technology is shaping media consumption: optimism and anxiety

6:42: Antidotes to enshittification? Content creation, hype cycles and monopolism

15:36: How the AI transformation is impacting "the fundamental building blocks of society"

30:25: What is artistically great in 2025? AI slop, the attention economy and the race to the bottom

36:36: The ethics of chatbots and the beginnings of a regulatory framework for AI

Related articles:

In an AI search era, brands must go where LLMs go

Mark Zuckerberg champions ‘superintelligence’ as Meta revenues jump

AI search presents ‘existential’ challenge to publishers

TikTok stakes claim as ‘home of search’ as it launches more AI ad tools

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