Friday 1st September: AI, IP, CNN etc.

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For all the good it’ll do, the Publishers Association is urging the UK government to consider the impact of widespread AI training to protect IP from being regurgitated and spat out by tech companies. Unfortunately the UK government is less tech-savvy than your average 90 year old and desperate for any boost to get out of the doldrums of Brexit, so they’ll plough ahead and let AI tools train themselves on any old thing without due consideration or compensation.

In the meantime, there’s bad news at the other end of the AI funnel. Back in the early days of AI integration into news products, I heard a lot about how high school sports was the ideal testbed for the tech. Match results get a lot of eyeballs but, most importantly, are easy enough to write-up in a basic fashion that you can turn an AI loose on it.

Well, in the wake of other AI mistakes getting inserted into news articles, Gannett has decided to pause the use of its own tool for doing just that — because it messed up some match write-ups. Maybe it should take a leaf out of Substack’s book and simply use the tech to transcribe podcasts. Seems safer.

Mark Thompson has been tapped to take the helm at CNN. As Margaret Sullivan points out for the Guardian he follows Jeff Zucker and Chris Licht, “who each flamed out in their own distinctive way”. However, given Thompson’s record at both the NYT and the BBC, she notes that he is a good choice for the beleaguered cable company. Although according to this article he bites, so…

Ecommerce-focused publishers were riding high with the deprecation of the third-party cookie, given that they have access to excellent data on their audiences and the trust required to sell them items on behalf of partners. This article from DCN breaks down where the threat might appear to those publishers from retail media — but where some other strengths might be maintained.

The barest-of-bare-bones social platforms is getting another update, this time bringing yet another feature it should have had at launch to its dwindling audience. I wouldn’t bet against Threads catching on yet, but it’s become clear by now that short of a radical rethink from Meta it will never act as the full Twitter replacement we all* wanted.

^{*crazy masochists who love watching the planet implode in 280-character increments}

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