The Media Copilot

Remember that AI song based on the voices of Drake and the Weeknd that made the rounds last fall ? It was a polarizing moment for AI — underscoring its power but also its peril, since neither artist had a say in the creation of that song. Enter Hooky . The fresh AI startup is trying to solve this problem, one that isn’t unique to music. It’s actually one of the biggest issues in generative AI, und...

I always feel good when I see fellow journalists going out on their own to build something new, and that's exactly what Nick Toso and Catalina Villegas are doing with Rolli . Toso is the former Washington Bureau Chief at CNN, and Villegas has worked as a producer and anchor for TV news. And with Rolli, they're creating a set of tools for journalists to help them work faster while producing better...

When it comes to the right and wrong of using AI in creative work, it's safe to say we're still figuring it out. That goes double for music, where AI has cultivated more than its share of lawsuits and suspicion from artists. From the audience perspective, AI is arguably changing things even more. Recommendation algorithms have the power to influence our tastes, but they also can put us in bubbles....

For companies building new things and trying to tell their story, there's a lot of talk about "going direct" lately. This is shorthand for a new(-ish) type of PR, where the founder and sometimes other key people simply use social platforms, newsletters and all the other tools of media themselves — eschewing the traditional route of telling their stories through journalists. The idea has gained tra...

Perplexity is here to answer your questions. Answering questions requires good information, though, and providing answers is easier if the people with the information actually want to give it to you. That’s a super-simple way of describing why Perplexity — the “answer engine” AI startup that pairs generative summaries with search — this week launched the Perplexity Publishers’ Program . By sharing...

AI companies hoovered up the entire internet before anyone questioned: Is that OK? This is the question that has led to a multitude of lawsuits (including, famously, The New York Times suing OpenAI ), many deals between AI companies and various publishers, and an emerging consensus that content creators should be compensated for their data. That's all well and good in theory, but what about the "h...

When you think about AI disrupting Hollywood, you typically think about CGI characters and creation tools like Sora and Pika that turn text prompts into impressively realistic visuals in seconds. But while technologies that create the things that meet our eyes understandably grab most of the headlines, there’s a quieter disruption happening at the very beginning of the moviemaking process. Dilip R...

When it comes to AI changing video, generative tools like Sora and Dream Machine have stolen a lot of the spotlight. with their ability to "imagine" video clips from text prompts. As cool as they are, most of them aren't available yet, and there's a big question of whether they actually save you any time. But while these magic clip generators create a lot of excitement, there's a quiet disruption...

Quick question: How do you know it’s really me in this podcast video? After all, with AI services like Synthesia and ElevenLabs ready to clone my likeness and voice in mere minutes, it’s more than a possibility these days. Besides obvious artifacts you might see in an AI-generated video, there’s the concept of content provenance , which in practice means a set of technical standards that imagery m...

Journalists are naturally skeptical people. They look critically at new things, especially when the incentives around them are complex, and that's certainly the case with AI. Given the early missteps of some sites publishing AI content and the existential threat the technology poses to distribution, it's only natural that a stigma around using AI has emerged among many reporters. That stigma is so...

In the latest episode of The Media Copilot podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Jon Gillham, founder of Originality.ai , about the nuanced world of AI-generated content and its detection. Jon's company started from a simple need in his content marketing business: ensuring that content was authentically created by humans, not AI. As AI sophistication has grown, so has the necessity for robus...

If past is prologue, the story of how AI changes media won't have a happy ending for those in the news business. Tech platforms profoundly altered the media landscape over the last 20 years, forever redefining how news is created, distributed, and monetized, and most media brands that tethered their strategy to tech platforms now find themselves diminished and, in some cases, demolished . Will his...

This week on The Media Copilot podcast I’m thrilled to talk to Alex Fink. Alex is the founder and CEO of Otherweb, a news aggregator that uses AI to give readers a healthier news diet than your average social media feed. Instead of optimizing for outrage or clickbait, Otherweb favors “kale over cake” — an analogy we come back to a few times in the conversation. Alex has an interesting career. Afte...

Yes, we know generative AI is bad for writing articles whole-cloth . But what IS it good for when you want to apply AI in a newsroom? In this week's episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal explores that question Joe Amditis , Associate Director of Operations at the Center for Cooperative Media. As part of his role, Joe researches how journalists can apply generative AI, both at the...

What's it like to come face-to-face with your own deepfake? Anne-Marie Tomchak knows, and the encounter is captured vividly in her documentary Game Changer: AI and You , which aired recently on Ireland's public broadcaster. It's a powerful moment, and one I would argue every journalist covering AI should experience: the unnerving feeling of seeing your own image and voice co-opted to say or do any...

Doing journalism with AI? What even is that? Up until recently, the answer to that question was a small part of the profession, mostly restricted to big publications with deep pockets and a sophisticated data strategy (think: The Washington Post or the AP ). But after ChatGPT said hello to the world a year and a half ago, however, "AI-powered news" was suddenly a blank canvas. After the world saw...

What happens when you teach your AI to churn out believable fictional characters? AImmersive co-founders Max Salamonowicz and Casey McBeath have built a tool for writers and creatives who want to create realistic video game and fiction characters. The tool they've created isn't just a simple character generator. It's an advanced AI system designed to produce believable, complex characters with uni...

Copyright is one of the biggest issues in AI. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg. AI explains how digital watermarking can help. It's fair to say the subject of copyright comes up a lot when you're talking about AI. Whether you're talking about a large language model (LLM) like the ones that power ChatGPT, or diffusion models that serve text-to-image creators like Midjourney, these generative system...

"Just imagine the whole society just crumbling over AI." People in Iceland don't have to imagine it. That quote from Siggi Arnason, CEO of OverTune , is describing the fallout from a viral video that his company's AI-powered technology helped create. The video was a comedy sketch that featured a recreation of a popular deceased Icelandic comedian, Hermann Gunnarsson. After it aired, over 90% of th...

When The New York Times filed its landmark lawsuit , accusing OpenAI of violating copyright by training its large language models (LLMs) on its journalism, some savvy observers had been expecting such a move for months. One of those people is Louise Story . Louise is a former Times staffer, spending several years as an investigative journalist before getting involved in strategy and building new f...

When ChatGPT showed how easy it was to write an "original" academic paper that could get a passing grade, the need for some kind of AI detector was suddenly starkly clear. The market quickly responded, and GPTZero , created by 23-year-old Edward Tian, was an overnight sensation last spring. College professors now routinely check papers for AI authorship. In the media world, the need for such a too...

At a time when most newsrooms across the world are considering, studying and, in some cases, experimenting with generative AI, at least one publication has enthusiastically embraced the technology, building it into workflows and publishing "synthetic" content on the regular. BusinessDesk in New Zealand uses ChatGPT and other AI models to augment what it’s serving up to subscribers, using the tech’...

Newsrooms can only get so far with pasting prompts into ChatGPT. Once you want to get more serious with generative AI, a media business should think seriously about running, fine-tuning, and perhaps even building their own large language model (LLM). There are a number of approaches to this, and it's easy enough to download a commercial or open-source model to run on your private cloud, or even yo...

In the year since ChatGPT arrived on the scene, journalism has grappled with the ethics of generative AI. From robot-written articles to the proliferation of “fake” images, the problems the media needs to think through have been bubbling in the background for a long time, but they've been exacerbated by the scale that generative AI makes possible. One person who's spent a lot of time thinking abou...

The past few days have turned the entire industry of generative AI upside-down. Before the weekend, OpenAI was sitting comfortably in pole position, riding high from a  series of recent announcements  designed to keep it there. Most of the world saw ChatGPT as the default starting place for anyone taking their first steps into AI, and the company’s models as setting the standard, with competitors...