As we step into a new year and new presidential administration, the media and technology landscape faces some significant shifts. While AI companies partner with major media outlets to train their models, social media platforms make changes that leave users in seeking decentralized platforms. In this Let’s Talk episode of the Tech in the Arts Podcast, AMT Lab’s Lead Researcher, Ian Hawthorne, and Chief Editor, Hannah Brainard, dive into the latest headlines.
Show Notes:
Transcript:
Ian Hawthorne:
Welcome to Tech in the Arts, the podcast series hosted by the Arts Management Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. We keep you updated on news and current developments in all things art, tech, and media. My name is Ian Hawthorne, and I'm the lead researcher here at AMT Lab. I'm joined today by Hannah Brainerd, chief editor of research.
In this episode, we'll chat about what we've been following in the news this month, focusing on how new management policies and technology are disrupting the media industry in the new year.
Hannah Brainard:
Hey, thanks so much, Ian. It's really good to be chatting with you today. And I know we have a lot to talk about, and especially at this intersection of journalism, media, and technology, and seeing how all of these players are interacting.
One headline that really caught my attention is this new relationship with Google and the Associated Press, or AP, as it’s more commonly known. They made this deal to feed all content from AP through Google's Gemini, which really can help build real time content in Gemini. This is a new revenue stream for AP that might be part of the reason for this arrangement, and this also helps Google in providing some reliable training data for the model.
Ian Hawthorne:
Yeah, I absolutely saw this as a big win win for both. I think that for a while we've known that news and traditional media sites are really struggling to adapt to the new era. I think that digital, going digital has really caused a lot of challenges for them to keep their audiences on. So, to have a new revenue stream like this is an upside to AI and I know we haven't talked a lot about that on this podcast all the time, but it does seem to be a good thing, because on the contrary, Google's AI overview actually gets accurate information to be able to report on this news.
That's kind of been a fallout recently between both Google and Apple. Their news has become notoriously bad. Kind of inaccurate. They, I don't know who out there has been following the headlines, but we're currently in the pizza glue era, where Google AI overview is actually suggesting some of the most just outrageous things, if you ask it, such as putting glue on your pizza. Apparently, it makes the cheese stick really nicely.
Hannah Brainard:
You haven't tried that?
Ian Hawthorne:
I have. It's delicious. Elmer's specifically. But yeah, I think in all seriousness, this is, I think, a good thing for both. Hopefully it allows AP to continue functioning as a news site, to have a more stable revenue stream, but also hopefully to make AI a little more accurate and a little more reliable.
Hannah Brainard:
Well, and most definitely we joke about glue on pizza or eating rocks. These kinds of silly things that are showing up, but in all seriousness, like that could be harmful and dangerous to people who are taking these seriously.
That could also introduce bias in a lot of different settings depending on where this information is coming from. So, there's a lot of pressure to get that right, to be able to use AI for this real time content in that way.
Ian Hawthorne:
Definitely, because it's like, what's the line between “glue on pizza” versus “Donald Trump won 2020” or any other potentially problematic news headline that could be seen as news too. And I think that's the biggest part of this partnership with news outlets and the media is that I think the news and the media has this sense of credibility of journalistic objectivity that we trust that I don't think we quite trust with AI yet.
Hannah Brainard:
Right. And it seems a little bit of a race to get there to this position to be able to do this right with different AI models. So we're talking about Google and AP, but actually OpenAI has done this going back as far as last year, partnering with Axios and 20 other media outlets in different ways to pull in this content. Initially their partnership with News Corp? News Corp was one. In May of 2024, they partnered with News Corp, with Wall Street Journal, New York Post, the Daily Telegraph in Australia, and much more. So that was both current and archival material. It was the first time they were pulling in this current material as well to help train the models and build this real time content.
This is really an interesting tension as well, thinking of how journalists are interacting in this space. I know recently there was a lawsuit with the New York Times. Journalists’ content is being used to train these models without their permission, without compensation, and that kind of thing.
So, this ecosystem of how AI is partnering with news and journalists, journalism outlets is interesting.
Ian Hawthorne:
Absolutely yeah. And we talk about this in the arts a lot, too, this imbalance between stealing images, stealing content to train these models on. And there's always been the answer of, “oh, well, what if we're allowed to sell it to them?” And I think that in some of the arts, it's kind of harder to imagine that realm.
But when you have big industrial deals like these between entire press houses, entire news sites. I think it starts to make a lot more sense and you start to see this model working where they make these deals and it's about sharing archives, sharing current news streams.
Hannah Brainard:
This is a new partnership with OpenAI and Axios. Part of this new investment that OpenAI is doing in local news stations, local media. They're helping fund the expansion into four cities, including Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder and Huntsville, Alabama. Really, like you said, supporting the newsroom, not necessarily just purchasing content, but helping in the creation process and how the tool is helping simplify the process of reporting as well.
Ian Hawthorne:
So not just journalism is being affected by this either. This whole race to make deals with AI, to compete with AI, is also bleeding into other fields that I didn't know about before, but the stock image and stock asset industry is kind of massive. And one big headline this month was actually that Shutterstock got acquired by Getty Images.
Now, many of you may know these two names because they have the watermarks on top of all the Google images. But this is big business, and they now have almost doubled their catalog of stock photos, stock music, stock film, all of these assets that are artistic assets that businesses and companies buy to basically have on hand to create collateral to create websites.
And so, it's a whole licensing ecosystem out there that this is going to impact. And a lot of analysts are saying this merger was really important to keep these companies competitive in a world where demand for this through AI has made it so much easier to work around stock images. Why pay for a picture of an office on Getty Images when you can ask DALL-E to create it, right?
And so, I think there's a dual aspect there where not only can they maybe stay more competitive on their price, but they can also start selling these catalogs to, again, feed these AI models. And who knows where that's going to go?
Hannah Brainard:
I mean, that's significant though, those two companies in particular. I mean, if you've done anything with marketing or any role that requires use of images, you know Getty and Shutterstock. And I think, I read that it, the combined value is 3. 7 billion in this new company.
So, I mean, that's a lot of control. But it could prove really beneficial to the companies in terms of reducing price and potentially to users in terms of the content that's available in one shared space.
Ian Hawthorne:
Definitely, yeah. And we have to also think about another big competitor in this space, which is Adobe. And they've been doing a lot recently with AI as well both in their platforms trying to integrate it, but then they're also a licensor of stock images.
So, it's really, you're starting to see it crop up in every corner of the digital realm, whether it's media, whether it's the stock images that go on the headlines of media. It's really starting to be everywhere.
Hannah Brainard:
Right. So that kind of makes me think talking about images in the digital space. There's a lot going on in the social media world right now. so many headlines in the news this week, about tech, big tech, the roles there. An interesting one is that, About the Washington Post and how they're planning to maybe use social media or more of an influencer model.
Tell us more about that.
Ian Hawthorne:
Yeah, the Washington Post. This was a really, it was an interesting story. It was kind of a sad story if you follow them as an outlet because they've been having a lot of shakeups recently. But they essentially gutted their advertising and PR team. There were 73 positions that were laid off.
They laid off roughly 4 percent of the company, which is pretty big. And they're shifting their whole model of selling their news product. So for background, the PR group or the advertising group of a newspaper basically tries to push these articles, push their news, push their documentary work along broadband channels through broadcast, through television, they try to get them to other journalists, they get them into the ecosystem.
And so without an advertising team so much they're focusing on what they're going to call the “star talent unit.” And so they're really going to follow what a lot of people are thinking to be more the social media content creator strategy where people rally around an identity, a person, a star journalist, who then connects with their audience and then acts as the connector between their audience and their marketers, their advertisers.
This has drawn a lot of scrutiny from people in the journalism world, because that's sort of a myth. It's a bit of a star system. The Post, admittedly, has the budget to have these types of stars, but it's, it's an interesting shift in the journalism world to basically try to start emulating more social media, and I think it's kind of interesting to see how those structures are changing and what that might mean for consumers of news, too.
Hannah Brainard:
Right. Yeah, that's interesting making it more, maybe, about the journalist than about the news that they're reporting. That kind of puts an interesting power structure in the way that we're reporting or perceiving information.
Ian Hawthorne:
Definitely. And I think, thinking back to what we talked about with the local news outlets earlier in their partnerships with AI There's so much news and information out there that I think the challenge now is not about publishing news, it's about how do you get people to read it from you, to read it on your site, to listen to it from your journalists.
And so I think I, this is the skeptic in me, but like I think we're moving towards a realm of more subjectivity in journalism, which is not necessarily bad, but I think adding more personality, more identity, and more subjective takes on top of news. I think we might start to see that more with a model like this if more places start to emulate, maybe.
Hannah Brainard:
Which can be a divisive tactic as well. And I think we've seen it in recent years in the political sphere as well. Sort of the influence of that kind of media and reporting.
Ian Hawthorne:
So you worry, is it just going to kind of further those divides, or could it act as a way to bring people together under a more human lense. Mm hmm. Who knows?
Hannah Brainard:
Yeah, that's not a pessimistic view. That's great.
Ian Hawthorne:
I'm, I'm trying this year. It's a, it's a resolution. Unfortunately, there's a more pessimistic thing that happened with Meta month, which is that they rolled out and very quickly rolled back AI powered profiles, are quite the opposite of following a content creator or an individual publishing news because they are robots essentially.
They are, they were profiles that were powered by AI. And drew a lot of backlash by basically people asking them, oftentimes that the profiles would represent minorities, people of color, women, who then when asked would say, “oh, my creator team is a bunch of white guys.”
Hannah Brainard:
Really?
Ian Hawthorne:
That was kind of problematic. And so I think within a week, they basically tried to scrape all of these from their site.
But it was kind of tragic in the wake of everything else that's happening over at Meta with Zuckerberg. Rolling back all the DEI commitments, cutting ties with third party fact checkers. It's interesting to see where that platform is going to amid all of…
Hannah Brainard:
…Yeah. You mentioned briefly the third party fact checking and moving away from that on Meta. That's an interesting shift and again, what does that mean for our changing relationship with social media?
Ian Hawthorne:
It's interesting when you think about people's views on it, because I do think some people want more of a free - free speech is an interesting question, right?
Where it's like, some people don't want it moderated. Some people know it needs to be moderated. What do we want out of these platforms? And I think especially looking at the rise of things like Bluesky or Mark Cuban publicly committing to finance a similar platform to TikTok also on these decentralized type networks. It's like, do people want legacy social media anymore? And his social media going to start to have the challenges that legacy media has been having where it's so much is happening. How do you get people to be on your platform versus the competitors, right? That's more digitally native, more in tune with a younger generation of news consumers and content consumers.
But those lines are becoming blurred to where it's like, what's the difference between news, content?
It's a tough, tough start to 2025.
Hannah Brainard:
That's, I mean, and you mentioned Tick Tock, which we don't even I don't think we have the time to go into that in too much
Ian Hawthorne:
Absolutely
Hannah Brainard:
But that's another interesting example of how this social media is relating to our political sphere and how people have responded to IT. We lost TikTok for one day…
Ian Hawthorne:
One day. One day.
Hannah Brainard:
…and the response to that was interesting in terms of who, like you said, Mark Cuban coming out with how do we find alternatives to this?
And what does this really mean?
Ian Hawthorne:
Mm hmm. I have a friend who's a high school teacher and over the weekend when we were texting about that, he was so worried to come in the day after TikTok ended because he was like, my kids are going to have a meltdown. And fortunate for him, I guess, it came back online, but it was a real concern that, you know.
An entire, and I know there's a lot of content creators too which are..
Hannah Brainard:
True. Yeah.
Ian Hawthorne:
I hesitate, it's kind of weird, I think content creators are a new form of artist in the modern day. Both performance artists, video artists businesspeople who run their livelihoods on these and it's interesting to see how they're going to be moving between these as well, as they kind of get shaken up.
Hannah Brainard:
Definitely. So I think we need some good news maybe.
Ian Hawthorne:
I think so too. so one, one bright spot in the media ecosystem and in the broader AI news realm too, is that in New York state, Governor Kathy Hochul actually passed an executive action this month that's about AI job replacement. And so part of it is about having businesses report when a job is eliminated because of AI.
Because either we don't need it, or it's easier for an executive to do with an AI program, we don't need this position anymore. And what's important about this is it's not necessarily preventing the job from being lost, but it's allowing the government to track it and really better inform public policy.
Because another part of this executive action was also committing some funding to AI training programs. particularly at minority and women owned businesses too in order to actually help adapt the workforce to this changing environment. So I think there's a lot of forward thinking coming out of New York and coming out of Hockel's office, which is giving me some hope.
Hannah Brainard:
Yeah. I like that. I mean, just even keeping track of the jobs that are lost in this space and how it's changing can be really helpful, really influential and make some change.
Ian Hawthorne:
Hopefully it doesn't go by the way of the California regulations, but it is I know you've done some policy tracking on on that realm And so it's always interesting to see where different governors and different states are going and in regards to this
Hannah Brainard:
Not opposing the shift toward AI in ways that can be helpful, but recognizing the impacts of it as well in different spaces.
Ian Hawthorne:
Recognizing and regulating and just trying to live with it because it's here to stay
Hannah Brainard:
Yeah, that is true.
Well, this has been a really fun conversation talking about journalism, how that's being impacted AI by AI and how it's influencing the way that AI models are moving forward, and even into social media and how creators are interacting in that space. There's a lot to keep track on going forward.
Ian Hawthorne:
Yeah, and definitely with a new administration, with a new year there's a lot on the horizon. It's going to be very interesting to track these going forward.
Hannah Brainard:
Well, thanks so much for the conversation. It's been a good one.
Ian Hawthorne:
Thank you.