Thursday 29th June: AI is accelerating the collapse of context online

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

We're proud to use Hindenburg for our podcast editing. Hindenburg is a professional-grade audio editing system made for speed and agility, and tailored for podcasts and audio storytelling. This link gets you an extended three month trial of Hindenburg Pro for business.

Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Hindenburg. (Book this ad slot)

AI is accelerating the collapse of context online (and I feel fine)

It’s an AI story, for which I can only apologise. One day I’ll lead a newsletter without one, I promise. But this article from Casey Newton is interesting in how it suddenly neatly encapsulates a lot of the cynicism about AI and its role in both the media and the context in which journalism appears.

For instance, the executive editor of the New York Times Joseph Khan has just said: “For every paragraph that ChatGPT instantly generates, it seems, it also creates a to-do list of facts that need to be checked, plagiarism to be considered, and policy questions for tech executives and site administrators.”

Personally I think this is a textbook example of Amara’s Law, but both Newton and Khan’s points stand. At the moment the new breed of AI tools are mostly having a deleterious impact on the fundamental structures of the internet and how it operates, while at the same time accelerating some surface-level trends around content creation.

Bad news for Google, as a research company has claimed that four fifths of its video ads on third-party sites fell short of the promised standard to advertisers. Adalytics claimed that despite promising that the video ads would appear on premium sites, they actually ran on sites that don’t match the ad giant’s criteria for advertising. This is potentially huge and, while Google is disputing it, feels like it’ll have ramifications for some time yet.

Actually quite liked this piece from Diana Bossio about the Online News Act. Despite the headline Bossio seems appropriately cynical about the motivations of both platforms and publishers, and specifically calls out the lack of transparency in the similar Australian deal that so many Murdoch stooges have conveniently ignored. A few days ago I despaired of a lack of nuance in this debate, so it’s great to finally see some.

At long last, it’s a good old fashioned media acquisition story!

Thomson Reuters is building out its streaming video capabilities, and the acquisition of Imagen will certainly help it do that. As an aside, look at how many verbs its president Paul Bascobert managed to pack into this sentence: “With the addition of Imagen, clients will have the ability to seamlessly add media asset management services to store, manipulate, permission, distribute and monetize all their visual content”.

More from Media Voices