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- Thursday 22nd June: The AI hype wave has crested, now the reality begins to bite
Thursday 22nd June: The AI hype wave has crested, now the reality begins to bite
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In yesterday’s special episode recorded from the FIPP Congress Peter noted that there was inevitably a lot of AI chat. Well for those of you like me who are getting bored of the hype cycle, here’s some insights from Ezra Eeman, change director at Mediahuis, who arguea that the wave has crested:
‘Eeman also laid out the secondary effects he foresees in a world where anyone can use generative AI to gain “creative superpowers.” “Generative AI has the potential to level the professional playing field in terms of content creation, which, in turn, raises the bar for real journalistic output,” Eeman said. “Differentiation and uniqueness is more important than ever.”’
That’s great news! For most, anyway. There are a lot of commodity news sites whose content is suddenly going to be a) bypassed by users using ChatGPT and others, and b) even more easily replicated than it already is, hurting their ad revenue. Digital publishing giveth, and digital publishing taketh away.
I’ve just written an article (out soon) on how various publishers are using different paywall strategies. What this data-led article from Jack Marshall demonstrates is why so much experimentation is taking place - competition is fierce, and it’s impacting promotional subscription prices.
The Prince Harry phone hacking trial is getting messier, with the judge in the case now asking why people like Morgan are happy to offer their opinions outside the court but not in it. Honestly you’d have thought that all the cited journalists would have been happy to shine a light on this deplorable practice where they could, the better to heal the public perception of journalism.
This is a chat we’ve had a few times at Media Voices and, bar a few special episodes, we’ve always shied away from video podcasts. In part it’s because we live hundreds of miles apart from one another, and not recording in a studio defeats a lot of the purpose. But mostly it’s because we record at 7am and haven’t got our faces on yet.
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