Wednesday 29th November: The rapid rise of synthetic content

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Mx3 AI is next week! Join Media Makers Meet and the Media Voices team in London on Dec 7th to explore how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.

Jacob Donnelly has written a thoughtful post on how AI-generated news stories are here to stay — and why. There’s a lot in here and it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, he and Skift’s Rafat Ali both suggest that LLMs that have been trained on a publishers’ content can offer a lot to audiences, in terms of sourcing and displaying relevant content and information.

Unfortunately, there will be negative examples of the rise of ‘synthetic content’ as the space develops. Oh, look, here’s one now. Sports Illustrated published articles that were entirely AI-generated and attributed them to false bylines. It took Futurism calling them out on it before those articles were taken down.

I’ve written the sections on both AI and Trust for our upcoming Media Moments 2023 report, and this would have fit into either as an example of what not to do. For one thing - don’t just publish AI-generated articles without disclosing the extent to which AI was involved. For another, don’t just do it because you can, otherwise you’re inviting suggestions that you’re just trying to cut actual journalists out of the business.

The BBC is making a big push for commercial revenue outside the UK - in no small part because the UK government keeps threatening to remove its main source of funding. What’s interesting here is the tie-up with Apple Podcasts, avoiding the mass-market distribution that even other podcast platforms like Spotify seem to be moving towards.

This is a fascinating case study of the sort we love here at Media Voices. Industry Dive recognised the value of going an inch wide but a mile deep, plumbing the depths of B2B expertise to discover something that other publishers cannot easily replicate. As ever, scaling and discovering the niches are where the difficulty lies, but this is a good look at how one company has done it.

Advertising revenue is finite, as print publishers have known for decades. Digital pure-plays and other media got a taste of dwindling ad spend over the course of the pandemic, but now Channel 4’s ad chief Alex Mahon has testified to MPs that it’s the broadcaster’s turn to feel the pain. As with the BBC, C4 provides a very necessary service, so we hope it recovers quickly.

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