Welcome to The Upgrade

Welcome to my weekly newsletter, which focuses on the intersection of AI, media, and storytelling. A special welcome to my new readers from Intel, ArtistMind, various journalism accelerators, and many other top organizations — you’re in good company!

In today’s issue:

• The Week’s Top AI Stories 📰

•  🪩 Recapping 2023: Media Experts Reflect on AI 🧐

• 🎓 January Classes are Filling Up! 💻

The Week’s Top AI Stories

Top AI Headlines

• Apple Explores A.I. Deals With News Publishers — The New York Times

• AI image-generators are being trained on explicit photos of children, a study shows — The Associated Press

• Artificial intelligence can find your location in photos, worrying privacy experts — NPR

• Imran Khan deploys AI clone to campaign from behind bars in Pakistan — The Guardian

Regulation & Policy

• Artificial Intelligence and the Law of the Horse — The Wall Street Journal (Opinion)

• The only AI 'regulation' coming is from workers — Yahoo Finance

• The Premature Quest for International AI Cooperation — Foreign Affairs

Ethics & Safety

• Meet the AI Whisperer — Marie Curie

• These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI — MIT Technology Review

• Building AI Safely Is Getting Harder and Harder — The Atlantic

Legal & Copyright

• AI cannot be patent 'inventor', UK Supreme Court rules in landmark case — Reuters

• Pulitzer Prize winners join AI copyright lawsuit — The Hill

In the Workplace

• Confronting Anxiety About AI: Workplace Strategies For Employee Mental Health — Forbes

• The promise and peril of AI at work in 2024, according to Deloitte's Tech Trends report — ZDNET

• The Potential $43 Billion Widening Racial Wealth Gap And Its Impact On Black Economic Mobility — People of Color in Tech

The Year of AI: 2023 in Review

As the year comes to an end, I posed the following question to a variety of media experts:

This year, we've witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of AI in media. From your perspective, how is AI technology reshaping the creative process or impacting the media industry?

Their responses are below. Some have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Generative AI has drastically altered how we should think about visuals, especially when it comes to authenticity, trust, and the relationships we have with our audiences. The potential for misinformation and manipulation has already been seen, evidenced by the Adobe Stock policy change surrounding images created about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Publishers need to react quickly by thinking about how they will experiment, enact guardrails, and adopt AI-usage.

— Tony Elkins, Faculty, Poynter Institute for Media Studies

After a lot of initial pushback, the journalism industry is beginning to embrace the use of AI, especially in the areas of data analysis and productivity. I've seen newsrooms use everything from transcription and translation via AI, to metadata and headline generation. It’s saving journalists time and freeing them up from mundane tasks to focus on quality storytelling. Journalists have been leveraging machine learning algorithms to detect trends over time, correlations between different variables, or anomalies in large data sets. AI can do this on a scale that would be almost impossible for a human, and in a really short time.

— Caoimhe Donnelly, Cofounder and CEO of Legitimate

In the media world, it feels like AI's main impact is showing us what NOT to do. It seems there has been story after story of various sites trying to automate content, and most of it has resulted in basic violations of quality and ethics. That's a good lesson for news media, but it also underscores that this is the internet now since the cost of producing "content" has dropped to zero, at least for anyone who doesn't care so much about those quality and ethics concerns.

— Pete Pachal, Founder of Media Copilot

AI is allowing you to do the job of four people within the hours of one person. It's exciting right now because of its ability to boost efficiency. But from a storytelling perspective, consistency is the real key to standing out. And I think that needs to have a human-centric storyteller to help that move along.

— Peter Frelik, Filmmaker

AI has fundamentally supercharged content creation, making it easier to convert text-to-video, speech-to-text, and every permutation you can think of! Gone are the days when we lamented, "If only I had more time to build up my YouTube channel." AI has given us the gift of so many productivity tools!

— Stacie Chan, Cofounder & Chief Business Officer of Vidiofy.ai

AI has added the ability to have conversations with stories or topics that are important or interesting to people and communities, providing deeper context and customized answers to specific questions that may not be covered in the original reporting.

— Joe Amditis, Assistant Director of Products and Events, Center for Cooperative Media

For better or worse, the use of AI in journalism this year has been mostly bad news. A selection of prominent websites have been caught "writing" news content using non-human authors. And in most cases the publishers gave the AI a human persona with a name, head shot and biographical sketch - making it clear they recognized the ethical violation and tried to hide it from readers. The positive aspects of the tech are probably more widespread - collecting public meeting agendas, data analysis, computer code generation and many similar productivity tasks, but those will continue to be overshadowed by the missteps.

— Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation at the Missouri School of Journalism

Journalists are adjusting and finding new ways to incorporate AI into their workflow. Our roles of editors and curators have never been so important. Anything produced by AI must be edited and fact-checked heavily before publication, for instance. As a journalism educator, I'm spending more time teaching prompt writing than I did, say, a year or two ago. Our jobs are adjusting and AI is testing ethical and legal boundaries. But the most important thing journalists must remember: technology only marches forward, never backward. And we must be adaptable.

— Mike Reilley, Founder, Journalist’s Toolbox

The great thing that all marketers are so excited about is personalisation at scale. Woohoo! More emails for more people, you know, selling them individually the things they want. Hurrah! I can't see it getting any better for consumers in terms of pure volume of content — of noise. Companies have to be quite specific about how they cut through that noise.

The consumer will not be given tools to filter out stuff it doesn't want to see. It's the companies that are paying for listings, the companies that are paying to advertise, and the companies who paying for the tools to reach more consumers with more rubbish that they don't know yet that they want to buy. I don't see how it will get better for consumers without regulation and being given the tools to refuse.

— Lucy Colback, freelance tech journalist for the Financial Times

In 2023, AI content creation has profoundly transformed the media landscape. This is not just a trend; it's a paradigm shift. It's enabling more people to create more content more efficiently and in ways that resonate more deeply with their audiences. It democratizes content creation, allowing individuals and small businesses to produce far higher-quality content than ever before. It streamlines tedious aspects of content creation, like editing and formatting, freeing creators to focus more on the creative aspects of their work.

— Jeremy Toeman, Cofounder and CEO, Aug X Labs

🎓 January Classes are Filling Up! 💻

AI Fundamentals for Professional Communicators and Marketers covers the essentials of Generative AI for media and marketing professionals with novice and beginner-level experience with AI tools. The live 90-minute sessions will take place on Wednesdays, starting January 17th, at 7pm ET / 4pm PT. Start 2024 by leveling up in AI!⚡️

The Executive’s Guide to AI + Media, led by industry pioneers and thought leaders, offers exclusive insights equipping leaders with the knowledge to navigate complex legal environments, leverage AI for competitive advantage, and optimize their digital strategy. The live 90-minute sessions will take place on Thursdays, starting January 11th, at 7pm ET / 4pm PT. Prepare your organization to get ahead!⚡️

Don’t be shy—hit reply if you have thoughts or feedback. I’d love to connect with you!

Until next week,

Peter

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