The Media Copilot

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...

In this week’s conversation, I talk to Brennan Woodruff of GoCharlie about how AI services based on content generation can contend with a ChatGPT-dominated world. Plus John Biggs and I break down the week’s news: YouTube’s guidelines for synthetic content, a new study rating the big models on hallucinations, and an inflection point on the thorny issue of fair use. John Biggs and I offer a crash co...

There are thousands of generative AI tools for content, and some actually work well. Generative tools can create SEO headlines , social copy , document analysis , and lots more for reporters and editors, all ready to enhance your productivity. However, there are roadblocks to incorporating these tools in day-to-day work. Beyond the basic concerns about quality and hallucinations, often the workflo...

It's still early days for generative AI, but the change it will inevitably impose on the news media is massive. If that sounds sounds scary to you, you should talk to someone. We'd recommend Brian Morrissey, author of The Rebooting newsletter and host of The Rebooting Show podcast, both of which get into the weeds of the media business. In this wide-ranging conversation, Brian and Pete Pachal atta...

Perhaps the people best positioned to thrive in tomorrow’s media ecosystem are today’s journalism students. Learning how generative AI can assist in their work while also learning the fundamentals of the trade means the next generation of reporters will have machines assisting their work from the start. Helping guide this vanguard of robot-enhanced journalists is Thomas Seymat. Thomas is the Edito...

The Media Copilot is a weekly discussion about generative AI and how it's changing media, journalism, and the news. After a news briefing where journalists Pete Pachal and John Biggs discuss the most recent AI headlines relevant to the media, we present a conversation with a new person every week — innovators, media executives, and fascinating people with compelling perspectives on AI. For this we...

The ethics of generative AI are more complicated than they might seem. Take generative images, like the ones created by DALL-E and Midjourney. Even when legal issues like the licensing of training imagery are addressed (as  Adobe Firefly  seems to), does that mean it's OK to create an image in the style of a well-known illustrator without their knowledge or approval? And does the prolific use of G...