Take a moment to reflect on what happened five years ago this week. A country isolated by Covid and horrified by footage of George Floyd's murder rose up to demand change. Remember the peaceful protests in big cities and small towns; the worst weekend of civil unrest in America since the 1960s; the arrests and assaults of reporters trying to tell the stories. As Jimmie Briggs wrote in this powerful Vanity Fair piece, "it is time to consider what has changed since."
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Raising the alarm on AI? 🚨 |
"AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it."
That's what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Anderson Cooper in this compelling interview last night.
It's happening fast, Amodei said — so fast that "the pace of progress keeps catching people off guard." Thus he said "think we do need to be raising the alarm" and help people see what's coming.
As Clare Duffy writes here, Amodei is warning that AI "could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20% in the next one to five years."
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'Shouting about the risks' |
"Amodei is a salesman," CNN's Allison Morrow points out in this skeptical followup piece, "and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary."
Right now, though, GenAI tools hit their limits fast. We mention AI screwups on a near-daily basis in this newsletter! Morrow says Amodei and co. should "show us how AI could be so destructive and how Anthropic can fix it — rather than just shouting about the risks."
On the other hand, AI is already impacting the workforce. By some accounts "AI is already erasing some entry-level coding jobs." For some recent graduates "the A.I. job apocalypse may already be here," Kevin Roose writes in a new NYT piece this morning.
Steven Zeitchik, who writes the Mind & Iron newsletter, argues that Amodei has "zero reason to be alarmist," but there is plenty to be alarmed about. It just requires thinking two or three steps ahead.
"Take Hollywood, the realm I've covered for large stretches of my career," he comments. "If you're a craft-services or makeup person you might think you're safe — an AI isn't cooking or applying a smokey eye. BUT AI production could drastically reduce the number of physical sets overall — who needs them when you can create so much in-model? And once you eliminate physical sets, all those physical jobs go with them."
The same goes for news media. The inevitability of AI replacing a chunk of what we do has fueled an existential crisis. Zeitchik writes that we journalists will have to get clever — and get back to the basics that a computer simply can't hack:
"Reporting and source-building is the kind of thing technology can't really do. As AI gobbles up from the bottom like some kind of Stephen King monster, journalists can avoid its hungry teeth in two ways: by getting so good at the writing part an LLM can't touch you (but do you really want to get into a footrace with AI?) or hopping off that vine onto one it's not even climbing, like in-person or real-time reporting."
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Video of Cooper's ten-minute interview with Amodei is up on X. Cooper asked him last night: "Do we as a society even understand the potential inequalities that this may amplify?" He brought up his kids, ages 3 and 5, and said, "What do they grow up aspiring to if machines can do pretty much everything better? What does it do to initiative or drive or striving?"
The questions are endless. Who and what will we be able to trust? The impacts of diminished trust in media is a theme of this newsletter. AI slop and actually-fake stories generated by bots are making it even worse. But therein lies opportunity, as well. So here's another question: Which news outlets are going to step up? Human-made media outlets that help people navigate this AI revolution are positioned to earn a lot of trust from the public...
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Five great AI-related reads |
>> AI-generated "fan fiction" about politicians is becoming "a barometer of political fame," David Weigel and Kadia Goba report. It's also evidence of an audience "so hungry for political conflict stories that it'll click on fakes." (Semafor)
>> Sara Guaglione chronicles the winners and losers of Google's AI Mode, placing news publishers firmly in the loser category. (Digiday)
>> Have you heard of "Italian brain rot"? Jennifer Zhan breaks down the GenAI meme phenomenon. (NY mag)
>> Joanna Stern and Jarrard Cole made an entire movie using AI. They say "you'll be blown away — and freaked out." (WSJ)
>> Larry J. Cohen and Sarah Montana argue that "AI’s Napster moment may be next." (THR)
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Lester Holt's final 'Nightly' |
In a world that needs more anchors, both in the television sense of the word and more broadly, anchor transitions are meaningful moments. Just ask the viewers who have spent time with Lester Holt for the past ten years. This morning Holt appeared on the "Today" show this morning ahead of his "Nightly News" sign-off tonight. "The time seemed to be right," he said of the transition to Tom Llamas. Holt will move to "Dateline" full-time. Here's the segment.
>> BTW, I agree with what Holt told me in this 2023 Esquire interview: "Yes, audiences are migrating. How people consume us, that's going to continue to change. I have no idea how in seventy-five years. Maybe it'll be little clouds in front of us. But 'Nightly News' will exist."
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It started with a tip on Saturday morning. NOTUS reporter Margaret Manto was told there might be some "issues" with the citations in last week's much-heralded Make America Healthy Again report. "When I started looking at them, I pretty quickly realized that I was going to have to look at every single one," Manto told CNN's Kaitlan Collins last night. Eventually Manto and Emily Kennard discovered that some of the cited reports didn't exist at all, leading to this blockbuster scoop, arguably the biggest story in the short but impressive history of the nonprofit newsroom.
>> Citation issues might seem small, but in science, "you really have to get the basics right, in order to then build on them, and to really be able to stake a claim as a credible researcher," Manto pointed out.
>> Were the errors AI-generated? The White House press secretary "didn't deny it, and deferred to HHS for comment. So, it's definitely something we're hoping to do more reporting on," Kennard said.
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The Spring 2025 Harvard Youth Poll is out. The survey of 2,096 young Americans between 18 and 29 years old included some questions about podcasters and political influencers. The findings might surprise you. Joe Rogan? Only 20% of respondents said they have a favorable view of him, and just 34% said unfavorable, while 21% said they didn't have enough info to rate Rogan, and another 22% said they'd never heard of him. Andrew Tate scored much lower, with only 8% expressing a favorable view.
The other figures were not as well known — only 34% of respondents knew Theo Von well enough to have an opinion, 21% knew Hasan Piker, and 18% knew Alex Cooper. Here's the PDF of the data.
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>> New Yorker's powerhouse PBS station WNET "has scrubbed its archives of at least three educational TV episodes that discuss transgender identity and drag expression," Nikita Mazurov reports. (The Intercept)
>> Meta "says loosening its enforcement policies earlier this year led to fewer erroneous takedowns on Facebook and Instagram—and didn't broadly expose users to more harmful content." (WIRED)
>> A new Pew analysis finds that despite the post-election Bluesky boomlet among news influencer types, Elon Musk's X remained almost as popular among newsies in early 2025 as it did in 2024. Furthermore, "news influencers tend to post more regularly on X." (Pew)
>> The NFL is shopping the highlight show "Inside the NFL" to multiple media suitors, John Ourand reports. (Puck)
>> Disney "is expanding a program of perks for subscribers to its flagship Disney+ streaming service and adding one for Hulu customers." (Bloomberg)
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For your weekend reading… |
>> I said "yes!" out loud while reading this Will Leitch piece: "I Can't Believe We’re Still Arguing About This." (NYT)
>> Sarah Scire spoke with Steve Strickbine, the local news owner who "thinks newspapers are better off diminished than dead." (NiemanLab)
>> Klaudia Jaźwińska explains why newsletters are enjoying (yet) a(nother) renaissance. (CJR)
>> Matt Taylor's Project Push archives push alerts from news publishers, generating a "fascinating portrait of the news today" across continents, Neel Dhanesha writes. (NiemanLab)
>> "Jon Rosen helped Stephen A. Smith nail a complex deal with ESPN," Brian Steinberg writes. "Can he aid others?" (Variety)
>> Hershal Pandya talked with SubwayTakes creator Kareem Rahma about the "growing pains" that come with his creator status. (Vulture)
>> "The show goes on:" Jesse Hassenger explores how Broadway achieved a record-breaking season. (The Guardian)
>> Don't miss Lucas Shaw's latest, greatest look at how YouTube "is swallowing TV whole." (Bloomberg)
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Check out 'Mountainhead' this weekend |
"Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong's new movie "Mountainhead" debuts Saturday night on HBO and Max. The NYT's Michelle Goldberg says it's a "delicious satire of the tech right."
"No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day's news cycle," she writes. "But art can help; it's not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy."
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Here's the thing about "The Rehearsal." Describing Nathan Fielder's "sometimes bleak, sometimes hilarious show to the unwatched is like trying to catch water with a net," Stephen Rodrick wrote while introducing his interview with Fielder and HBO exec Amy Gravitt.
But for those who have watched, Fielder's visit to "The Situation Room" was must-see TV, all 17 minutes of it...
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Entertainment odds and ends |
>> "Disney's 'Lilo & Stitch' has teed up this summer’s box office to arguably become the best one since Covid with a projected $4.2 billion in the U.S. and Canada after breaking a slew of records over its opening Memorial Day weekend frame." (Deadline)
>> "Lilo" is forecast to make another $55 million to $65 million over the course of its sophomore weekend. Sony's "Karate Kid: Legends" is looking at $25 million to $35 million during its opening weekend. Boxoffice Pro)
>> Asked about a possible "Severance" spinoff, Ben Stiller told Ethan Shanfeld there are "two specific ideas" that are "nascent." This entire cover story is a fantastic read. (Variety)
>> The original cast of "Hamilton" will "reunite at the Tony Awards for a special anniversary performance on June 8." (THR)
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