The Media Copilot

The past few days have turned the entire industry of generative AI upside-down. Before the weekend, OpenAI was sitting comfortably in pole position, riding high from a series of recent announcements designed to keep it there. Most of the world saw ChatGPT as the default starting place for anyone taking their first steps into AI, and the company’s models as setting the standard, with competitors fighting for scraps of mind share. Now we're in a completely different world. Ever since its board fired CEO Sam Altman in a surprise move Friday afternoon, the situation at OpenAI — and the marketplace for generative AI tools — has been in flux. There have been so many developments since Friday that it's been difficult to keep up (here’s a good summary), but the current state of affairs is a standoff between OpenAI's employees and the board. The staff wants Altman reinstated and the board to resign, or they're all going to follow Altman to Microsoft (far and away OpenAI's biggest investor), which offered him a job as CEO of a new AI subsidiary. Microsoft has said it would indeed hire the defecting staffers. On this week's Media Copilot podcast, John Biggs and I are joined by Peter Bittner from The Upgrade to discuss these possible scenarios for OpenAI and what they mean to customers… and competitors. Whatever happens, one thing has been made very clear: the field of generative AI will not be the same after this. The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow on X.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Favorite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

In this week’s conversation, I talk to Brennan Woodruff of GoCharlie about how AI services based on content generation can contend with a ChatGPT-dominated world. Plus John Biggs and I break down the week’s news: YouTube’s guidelines for synthetic content, a new study rating the big models on hallucinations, and an inflection point on the thorny issue of fair use. John Biggs and I offer a crash course on using AI for marketing and media. Learn more about the 3-hour session here. When you’re running a startup, you’re already in a race. When you’re running an AI startup, you’re essentially in the New York City marathon. It’s already a slog, and you’re wall-to-wall with thousands of competitors of all stripes. Whether or not you succeed depends on the kind of race you’re running: Do you want to win the whole thing, beat your personal best, or be top in your category? GoCharlie appears to be aiming for the third option. The AI startup is one of many that specializes in creating marketing copy, images, and other material, but it differentiates itself by applying its own large language model (LLM) trained specifically for that use case. That would seem to give the young company an advantage, but now that OpenAI had made it easy for anyone to create task-specific GPTs with assistants — and is creating a platform to sell them — can GoCharlie get past this “extinction-level event” for AI startups? I spoke with co-founder Brennan Woodruff about GoCharlie, what it brings to the table to marketers and media people, and how AI entrepreneurs can stay in the race even when running alongside a ChatGPT that’s wearing rocket boots. In this week’s AI news that’s most relevant to media… What even is fair use anyway? Ed Newton-Rex, the VP of Audio at Stability AI — the creator of the Stable Diffusion image generator — very publicly resigned from the company, arguing strongly against the perspective, common among tech companies, that training AI models on copyrighted material constitutes fair use. Let’s put “Hail Hydra” at the end of every deepfake: YouTube kinda-sorta took a stand on deepfakes, introducing new requirements for creators to label “synthetic” content made to look realistic, but allowing a parody/satire exception. It’s a important step, though still leaves a lot up to YouTube’s human moderators. Also: anyone making bank off of songs made from cloned voices of various artists is on notice now that those artists can force synthetic songs to be taken down. Progress? Probably. But other platforms (a certain single-letter network comes to mind) will likely have different standards. Wait, people use Notion? This week Notion launched Q&A, an AI-powered feature that can scan all the material you’ve put on the service to inform answers to specific queries — essentially letting you have a conversation with your work. This is the dream of Google Bard’s feature that connects with all your Gmail and Google Docs, but Notion’s thingie probably has a better chance of giving useful answers since it probably won’t have every grocery list you’ve made since 2006 in there. The Hallucination Olympics: Rankings for which generative AI model hallucinates the most are out, and boy, Google’s Gemini upgrade can’t come fast enough — Google Palm, which powers Bard, was dead last. Perhaps not surprisingly, OpenAI’s models lead the pack, though some smart folks were able to get Llama 2 into the same category. Hallucinations will never go away entirely, but we’re optimistic that the robots will continue to get better at, you know, facts. Now if we could just to the same with bias… The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow on X.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Favorite⁠⁠⁠⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

There are thousands of generative AI tools for content, and some actually work well. Generative tools can create SEO headlines, social copy, document analysis, and lots more for reporters and editors, all ready to enhance your productivity. However, there are roadblocks to incorporating these tools in day-to-day work. Beyond the basic concerns about quality and hallucinations, often the workflow itself is the issue: Incorporating a new tool typically means another login, another browser window open, and a new app to get familiar with. Then, if you’re constantly copying and pasting from the tool to your CMS and back again, the gains in efficiency start to drop. In other words, GenAI has the best chance of being effective when it’s integrated into existing workflows. That’s the magic of YESEO, a tool developed by Ryan Restivo in partnership with the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri. While there are any number of tools that will serve up SEO headlines for news stories, YESEO was created specifically for Slack, the collaboration platform found in almost every newsroom. I spoke to Ryan about developing YESEO — which he began before the general release of ChatGPT — how newsrooms can develop a pragmatic approach to generative AI tools, and what a reporter’s workflow looks like in a future world where GenAI tools are as common as spellcheckers. The Media Copilot is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Follow on X.⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠ Music: ⁠⁠⁠Favorite⁠⁠⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

It's still early days for generative AI, but the change it will inevitably impose on the news media is massive. If that sounds sounds scary to you, you should talk to someone. We'd recommend Brian Morrissey, author of The Rebooting newsletter and host of The Rebooting Show podcast, both of which get into the weeds of the media business. In this wide-ranging conversation, Brian and Pete Pachal attack the big questions around GenAI and media: What happens when AI becomes the dominant force in search and SEO traffic to news sites dries up? What does the publisher-audience relationship look like in an AI-mediated world? And how can media companies get ahead of the coming GenAI wave — and maybe even ride it? The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Follow on X.⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠ Music: ⁠⁠Favorite⁠⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

Perhaps the people best positioned to thrive in tomorrow’s media ecosystem are today’s journalism students. Learning how generative AI can assist in their work while also learning the fundamentals of the trade means the next generation of reporters will have machines assisting their work from the start. Helping guide this vanguard of robot-enhanced journalists is Thomas Seymat. Thomas is the Editorial Projects and Development Manager for Euronews, and he also teaches at the Journalist Training Center in France, one of the oldest journalism schools in Europe. This fall he’s leading a class on the use of GenAI in reporting, coaching them on how ChatGPT, Midjourney and other tools can make them stronger, more efficient reporters while also establishing where the guardrails are on their use. Our conversation was illuminating — and somewhat reassuring — about the future of journalism and the next generation. Thomas revealed how his students are already using these tools, their thoughts on the ethics of AI, and some “road to Damascus” moments in their journey. On the news brief, John Biggs and I discuss why labeling content as “AI assisted” is practically useless, whether or not Apple’s new AI-ready Macs mean anything, and that the White House executive order on AI might actually be pretty good? That’s up first. Information on the AI class John and I are teaching is here. More to come on that soon. This week's top AI stories for media: The White House executive order on AI Is it misguided? Or actually pretty good? Our take on what it means for media Labeling won't solve AI's problems (Axios) IAC warns regulators generative AI could wreck the web (Axios) Apple mentions AI, finally (CNN) The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠ ⁠Follow on X.⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠Apple⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠ Music: ⁠Favorite⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

The Media Copilot is a weekly discussion about generative AI and how it's changing media, journalism, and the news. After a news briefing where journalists Pete Pachal and John Biggs discuss the most recent AI headlines relevant to the media, we present a conversation with a new person every week — innovators, media executives, and fascinating people with compelling perspectives on AI. For this week's conversation, we welcome Jeremy Caplan, author of the newsletter Wonder Tools and Director of Teaching and Learning at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. We spoke to Jeremy about not just the tools journalists can use to begin using generative AI in their day-to-day, but also the mentality needed to get the most out of this unprecedented moment in media. If you watch the video version of the podcast, you may notice Jeremy’s video was slightly out of sync with his audio. We tried to fix this in post and failed, but rest assured Jeremy talks just like a normal human when he has a better internet connection. Here are the stories from the news briefing: Nightshade "Poisons" AI models by altering metadata on images (Ars Technica) Twelve Labs shows off AI that can "watch" and interpret videos (The Neuron) An AI designed to clean up Wikipedia citations (Nature) Anthropic is crowd-sourcing an "AI constitution" (Axios) The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠ ⁠Follow on X.⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠Apple⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠ Music: ⁠Favorite⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023

The ethics of generative AI are more complicated than they might seem. Take generative images, like the ones created by DALL-E and Midjourney. Even when legal issues like the licensing of training imagery are addressed (as Adobe Firefly seems to), does that mean it's OK to create an image in the style of a well-known illustrator without their knowledge or approval? And does the prolific use of GenAI images cheapen the entire practice of photo illustration? That was one of many topics I talked about this week with Harry McCracken, Global Technology Editor for Fast Company, and a key member of the publication's internal team exploring generative AI. Harry has been covering tech since the dawn of the internet and has had a front-row seat every innovation in tech since then. Over the past several months he's plunged deep into AI, and the topic features regularly in his newsletter, Plugged In, such as this recent piece on the dawn of "self-aware" software. Harry is also the first guest in what will become a regular feature on The Media Copilot: Friday Conversations, where I chat with journalists, media executives, and interesting people doing interesting things with generative AI and the news. This first conversation is free for everybody, but I plan to make these conversations exclusive to paid subscribers starting next week. If you don’t want to miss any, it might be a good idea to take advantage of that subscribe button below 👇 I hope you find the conversation as stimulating as I did. Look for more insights from fascinating people working at the intersection of media and GenAI in the coming weeks. The Media Copilot is a podcast and newsletter that explores how generative AI is changing media, journalism, and the news. ⁠Subscribe to the newsletter.⁠ ⁠Follow on X.⁠ Subscribe to the podcast on: ⁠Apple⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠ Music: ⁠Favorite⁠ by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License © AnyWho Media 2023