Welcome to The Upgrade

Welcome to the fourth edition of my weekly newsletter, which focuses on the intersection of AI, media, and storytelling. A special welcome to my new readers from The American Press Institute, Accenture, CalChamber, and many other outstanding organizations — you’re in good company!

In today’s issue:

• The Week’s Top AI Stories 📰

• 💵 Special Offer: 15% Off My New Online Course! 💻

• Quick Quote: BBC Releases GenAI Guidelines 🤖 

• The Interview 🎙️: Cofounders of Legitimate, AI startup for journalists, help us sort the real from the hype!

The Week’s Top AI Stories

Gen AI Tools

• Play Text RPG Games With Snoop Dogg (Meta) — PCMag

  

  Celebrities who have been turned into AI alter-egos by Meta.

• Meta is paying creators millions for AI chatbots — The Information

• Google Photos’ new AI tools are as complicated and messy as a memory — The Verge

• The Latest AI Chatbots Can Handle Text, Images and Sound. Here’s How — The Scientific American

• The New ChatGPT Can ‘See’ and ‘Talk.’ Here’s What It’s Like. — The New York Times

• Adobe teases new AI photo editing tool that will ‘revolutionize’ its products — The Verge

• Google Bard’s Memory feature will let you teach the chatbot about yourself — BGR

Regulation & Policy

• How Big Tech is co-opting the rising stars of artificial intelligence — The Washington Post

• AI’s Present Matters More Than Its Imagined Future — The Atlantic

Ethics & Safety

• SoftBank’s Son Says Artificial General Intelligence Will Soon Surpass Humans — The Wall Street Journal

• Artificial intelligence may be humanity's most ingenious invention… depending on whom you ask, it might also wipe out all mankind — Vanity Fair

• AI Algorithms Are Biased Against Skin With Yellow Hues — WIRED

• AI was asked to create images of Black African docs treating white kids. Howd it go? — NPR

Privacy & Security

• Inside the Secretive AI Company That Knows Your Face — NPR Fresh Air (Audio)

• NSA's new project takes aim at foreign AI hacks — Axios

Legal & Copyright

• Tom Hanks Warns of Dental Ad Using A.I. Version of Him — The New York Times (Original Instagram post above)👆

• How deepfake videos are causing real problems for celebrities — The Today Show

• Canva bolsters AI offerings, providing copyright indemnity for AI-generated images — ComputerWorld

In the Workplace

• How AI May Change Entrepreneurship — The Wall Street Journal

• Job postings mentioning AI have more than doubled in two years, LinkedIn data shows — CNBC

• AI use cases: How genAI summaries are boosting Daily Maverick’s readership — World Association of News Publishers

15% Off My New Online Course

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new online certificate course! The 6-week class, based on my curriculum at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, will cover the essentials of Generative AI for media and marketing professionals.

The live course will take place on Wednesdays at 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT beginning October 18th. The 90-minute Zoom sessions will be split into lectures and hands-on exercises and activities, culminating in a final capstone project. Want to get up to speed and get ahead? Now’s your chance: act now before the course fills up!

(If those dates or times don’t work, but you’re interested in learning about future cohorts, please sign up for the waitlist here.)

The Interview: Founders of Legitimate

Power couple Caoimhe and Gerard Donnelly, (CEO and CTO, respectively) are the co-founders of Legitimate, an AI-powered platform for journalists. I spoke with them about automation, content authenticity, the anthropomorphism of AI, and more!

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Peter: What are the features that journalists and newsrooms are using the most in Legitimate? How do they help boost productivity?

Caoimhe: We're finding through our trials that the AI tools save journalists about 90 minutes a day. It saves them time on the mundane stuff like creating metadata, writing social media posts, and transcription. Things that are just time drains. They're not using your creativity. They're just bits that have to be done. The way we're using our AI is to take those boring routine things away so you can use your time to do what you love: to write, investigate, or develop sources—the things that AI just can't and probably will never be able to do.

Peter: There's a real fear in the industry now that automation and AI may eliminate jobs. What’s your view on that at Legitimate?

Caoimhe: All of the tools that we have built are only useful if there's a journalist using them. They're not going to do anything for you without you using it. It’s only going to assist the journalists and will free them up to do the important elements of their reporting.

Peter: There's been reporting on AI-powered content farms and plagiarized knockoff websites of major brands and publications. How can publishers protect the integrity of their brand and content?

Gerard: There are gonna be these copycat sites that come up. People can now automate and take all of another website’s content and replicate it by writing the article slightly differently, with any spin they want. So, there will need to be mechanisms put in place to bring down those sites or bring legal cases against them to be able to remove them or prevent them from being indexed.

Caoimhe: Next year, with over a billion people in the world voting, these content farms—particularly those distributing misinformation— will pose a really serious problem. If newsrooms use our tools, we can give their readers some reassurance by seeing the little card popping up with the author and what else the journalists have written. Readers can click and see the publication’s portfolio and can have confidence in the identity and authenticity of their news source.

Peter: What do you think is the most hyped part of AI right now or the biggest misconception?

Caoimhe: Many people I'm speaking with misunderstand what AI is. People talk about it as if it were a person. I think a huge misconception is that it’s like you're asking your friend something, and they're giving you their opinion. That could be very dangerous going forward because it's not human, but people are speaking about it like it is.

Gerard: People are probably getting so excited with AI because of ChatGPT, but it's actually been around for years. If you've ever used Grammarly, you've been using AI. When you use Google and it generates predictive text in the search bar: that's AI. If you've used any automatic transcription, that's a version of AI. It's nothing new. The launch of many large language models this year has shown the general public the potential of AI. But it's been there for a while, and I think it's now just becoming mainstream.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great weekend!

If you liked this edition, please share it with someone who might enjoy reading it. 📧 

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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