Another AI Year in the Books

Hi all. Welcome to the final Public Media Innovators Weekly of 2024. This week we’ve got Ethan Mollick’s informal state of gAI, ChatGPT’s misrepresentation of publisher content, and finally, a look at the intersections of emerging tech and religion.

But First…

It was, as it always is, great to see so many of you on last week’s webinar with Talia Rosen from PBS Standards. If you missed any part of this collaboration with the Executive Content Managers group, you can watch it on our archive page. And please do share this with your colleagues. Talia’s deck is top shelf, and we had some good Q&A that can really help start a good discussion in your shop about how to use tools that are unavoidably the future of public media.

And save the date for our first webinar of the new year. On January 16, at 1pET/10aPT, we’ll bring back our collaboration with Current for “Innovate with Current: Visions for Public Media’s Future.” There’s a saying: “What got you here may not get you where you’re going.” PBS and NPR have rich histories of service to Americans. But, frankly, the speed of change in media poses a serious threat to any organization that isn’t prepared to be an innovator of that service. How do we tackle a future with this much uncertainty? This webinar will present multiple visions for what public media can and should be as we race toward 2030 and a media landscape that looks increasingly alien.

Taking Stock

Any time of the year is the right time of year for gratitude, but it’s a hallmark of our culture that it pools as we move into the darker months. At the start of 2024, we had a vision for a webinar series and an email list that had grown to about 270 people. Eleven webinars, 40 explorations (counting this one), and 350 new subscribers later (totaling 620+ now), and it’s clear there is a hunger within public media to think and talk about innovation (and especially innovation in media and technology).

We are looking forward to growing all those metrics and are thinking about other ways to support public media as we all tackle the challenges of the year ahead. The threats we are going to face as a system and as a community will be greater than at any point in our careers, which means the opportunities are also greater than ever. And that means innovation is going to be more important than ever.

Your thoughts on what you’d like to see from this community would be very welcome. Please message me here on LinkedIn. It’s the nature of human community that at any given time, 90% of a group observe, 9% participate and 1% drive the momentum of the group. If you identify with that active 10%, reach out and let us know what you think.

This newsletter will return around January 15.

Okay, on to the links…

Focus…

What just happened (Ethan Mollick - One Useful Thing) - 2024, like 2023 before it, was a year of AI advances, capped with a number of announcements in recent days and weeks from both OpenAI and Google. And 2025 doesn't appear to be any different. So, wrapping the year with a summary from Ethan Mollick, seems appropriate. —Extra Credit: Matteo Wong’s piece in The Atlantic, The GPT Era Is Already Ending

Learn…

Innovate with Current: Visions for Public Media’s Future - Thursday, January 16, 1pET/10aPT - There’s a saying: “What got you here may not get you where you’re going.” PBS and NPR have rich histories of service to Americans. But, frankly, the speed of change in media poses a serious threat to any organization that isn’t prepared to be an innovator of that service. How do we tackle a future with this much uncertainty? This webinar will present multiple visions for what public media can and should be as we race toward 2030 and a media landscape that looks increasingly alien. You can register for the webinar here. —And you can still catch last week’s webinar Unleashing Creativity and Applying Standards to Generative AI.

Earn…

Open Call on Infrastructure (Press Forward) - This one has a tight turnaround (deadline is noon ET, 1/15) but if you have an idea already baking in your shop then give this one a look. —Going forward, when we find them, we'll be publishing grant opportunities here in the newsletter. If you see one that we should share with the community, send it my way!

GNI AI Lab for News Sustainability (Google) - H/t to Liz Maestri at PMVG for making me aware of this one. The following is from their application form. “The program will begin in March 2025 and run approximately six months…. This program will help organizations use AI to drive the business of news, giving participants a structured way to test AI tools in pursuit of key business goals such as: audience development, revenue growth, product development, operational efficiency, data analytics, or other focuses as sought by the participants. The AI Lab is a perfect fit for operational leaders inside news organizations who have dabbled in generative AI but haven’t yet found a way to put it to work for their major business goals.” — It continues. “Your organization is a good fit if: You are a local news organization (digital, print, broadcast, etc.), nonprofit or for-profit, focused on public service for audiences in the United States or Canada; You have an interest in experimenting with AI applications to better support your business in any of the areas listed above, and you are committed to a test-and-learn mindset to pursue it; There’s a particular focus on applicants who self identify in the following ways: Your news organization is owned, led by, or serves Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and/or other people of color; your news organization is owned, led by, or serves women or the LGBTQ+ community; and/or your news organization serves a defined local community.”

Think…

How philosopher Shannon Vallor delivered the year’s best critique of AI (Alex Pasternack - FastCompany) - This line resonates with me: "As we discover what AI can do, we’ll need to focus on leveraging uniquely human traits, too, like context-driven reasoning and moral judgment, and on cultivating our distinctly human capacities." I may try to check out her book over the holiday break.

The Fantasy of Cozy Tech (Kyle Chayka - The New Yorker) - This piece speaks to both the needs of a particular audience, and to an aspect of 'lifelong play.' Cozy games are an ideal strand for public media to explore and perfect.

Cable TV Is on Its Very Last Legs. Next Year May Be the End. (Nitish Pahwa - Slate) - I'm of the opinion that cable TV will die when no one cares about cable TV any more...in which case, it won't matter that it died. And lots of people are predicting the death of cable and/or broadcast in 2025. I think this is part of the “mainstream media is dead” overreaction to the election and that we’ll eventually regress toward the mean understanding of media. Besides, once cable does go, we'll still have the remnants of cable: FAST channels.

Know…

How ChatGPT Search (Mis)represents Publisher Content (Klaudia Jaźwińska & Aisvarya Chandrasekar - CJR) - Here's a key line: "By treating journalism as decontextualized content with little regard for the circumstances in which an article was originally published, ChatGPT’s search tool risks distancing audiences from publishers and incentivizing plagiarism or aggregation reporting over thoughtful, well-produced outputs." Watch this space carefully in 2025. The unprecedented attacks on Google from within the industry (OpenAI, Perplexity) and without (federal and state legal action potentially leading to Google's breakup a la AT&T in the '80s). —See also: ChatGPT presented a public update, with demos, of its search tool last week. If you haven’t tried ChatGPT search, at least check this out to get a sense of how the world of search is changing. —And Pete Pachal’s The Unstoppable Rise of AI Summaries is also worth a read.

🔊 How Gannett is adapting for an AI era (Brian Morrissey - The Rebooting Show) - There’s good discussion here in this podcast on how a major publisher is beginning to adapt to an AI-infused world. I appreciated the prioritization of a premium user experience. Especially for public media, monetization is important but consumers expect more of a premium experience from us. —See also, the summary in Morrissey's parallel newsletter.

Stupidest new idea in journalism: a ‘bias meter’ (Mark Jacob - Stop the Presses) - H/T to NPM's Director of Research, Collin Berke, for sending this my way. The headline is clickbait, but there's a good point for rumination here. On the one hand, I can see the problem that the LA Times owner is trying to solve. But as Jacob points out, Journalism already has systems in place to address a lot of these concerns. So there is a certain tech fetish at play here where it seems Soon-Shiong wants to use tech more for the sake of using tech, than to really address a larger problem. —And, for more context, this piece was published by The Guardian just prior to me sending out this newsletter: LA Times owner asks editorial board to ‘take a break’ from writing about Trump – report

State-of-the-art video and image generation with Veo 2 and Imagen 3 (Aäron van den Oord & Elias Roman - Google) - Last week we talked about OpenAI's '12 Days of Shipmas," where they launched Sora. It's compelling to me how much OpenAI drives the conversation now, because Google is mimicking their burst release strategy. Not to be outdone by Sora, they are rolling out updated image and video generators. I've not been able to get access to these yet, so more on that in the new year, but you might give these a try if you're playing around with new tools around the holidays.

AI Entertainment Studios: The New Breed of Companies Pioneering Gen AI-Powered Production (Audrey Schomer - Variety) - The key strategy for some Hollywood studios now it to lean into the more seasoned professionals that have been investing the time to learn these gAI tools. We should be doing the same. —Related: Andy Stout’s piece in Redshark News, How Hollywood is adopting genAI: slowly but also steadily

Why filmmaker Nenad Cicin-Sain fired his AI screenwriter (Reed Albergotti - Semafor) - Interestingly, if the goal of gAI outputs is to seem increasingly more human, this example shows ChatGPT succeeding in unexpected ways.

YouTube will now let creators opt in to third-party AI training (Sarah Perez - TechCrunch) - I'm glad this is opt-in for creators, not something you have to winnow your way out off via a crappy UI. It's a good step forward for YouTube, and hopefully this normalizes creator control in the age of AI.

Smash that replay button: A 2024 recap of YouTube on TV (Kurt Wilms - YouTube Official Blog) - Essentially, this is YouTube taking its book, but even allowing for that, the stats are worth knowing. The value of the giant central screen still exists, even if the content isn't made with blue-chip production values. Case in point, podcasts are characterized as the modern-day equivalent of the late night talk show.

The 2024 state of social media (Taylor Lorenz - User Mag) - I don't cover social media much here (that's Zach Waldman's beat...seriously, subscribe to his monthly newsletter, it's good), but I am interested in it at a macro, media strategy level. And the study covered in the opening section of this newsletter offers some interesting insights, especially relative to "edutainment" (news and what we would call "factual" content).

And finally…

Digital Divinity (Cengiz Yar - Rest of the World) - I’m sending you off into the new year with this excellent compendium of stories from around the globe of how technology is augmenting and reshaping religious practice. Even if, like me, you aren't religious, these stories ultimately show how emerging technologies impact culture. And, as the saying goes, "culture eats strategy for breakfast." That saying is always trotted out in a business context, but I think it's just as true at a larger, societal level. To develop effective strategies for your organization, you need to understand the intersection of technology and culture.

Have a safe, relaxing holiday break and a happy New Year!