← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Eli Pariser on the end of the feed and how AI will change your morning routine
00:50:00
Loading summary
Transcript100 lines
- [00:00]
Eli Pariser
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Max Tawney
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all of the most important and interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore, and with me, as always, is is our editor in chief, Semaphore's editor in chief, that is Ben Smith. Ben, do you use AI in your media consumption? Do you ever have it summarize articles for you? Are you having it generate some personalized podcasts to give you the news? Has AI infected your media consumption yet?
- [00:48]
Ben Smith
Probably the way that I use it most and I don't see we sometimes use it this way at Semaphore is if I read something that I'm like an, and there's an argument and I'm sort of shaky on it, I'll say, can you find me something that disagrees with this? Can you like, test find something else in some language that will kind of like challenge this idea?
- [01:05]
Max Tawney
Well, you did build. We actually internally built a tool that would basically, what, steel man? Some arguments? Essentially it would feed some headline or some story into this AI tool and it would respond to us as, for example. And these are real examples. Sorry if I'm revealing some trade secrets here on the left, Mehdi Hassan. And on the right, Ben Shapiro. It would insult us in the styles
- [01:31]
Ben Smith
of either Mehdi or Steelman is a strong word. But I did spend a very proud Sunday vibe coding with, I think, some combination of all of Gemini and Chat, this app that predicts mean tweets about stories. It didn't get wide adoption inside Semaphore, although it is in our leg in the sidebar of Google Docs. But I was very proud of it.
- [01:48]
Max Tawney
I think it's because we don't really need it. If we put something out onto the
- [01:51]
Ben Smith
Internet like, essentially, we know what JD Vance is gonna say about it if he has a show.
- [01:55]
Max Tawney
Exactly. Well, the reason why I'm asking this, because our guest on the show today is somebody who envisions a world where much of our media consumption is going to be channeled through artificial intelligence. We're talking to Eli Pariser. He is the co director of New Public. It's a media and technology organization. He was also the co founder of Upworthy and he's the author of a remarkable new report called after the Feed. Ben, you were actually interviewed. You're cited as part of this report. Tell the audience why I found it to be so interesting and so slightly disturbing.
- [02:29]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I mean, I start by saying Eli is a really consequential figure in sort of the history of the Internet. Right after 9 11, he ran MoveOn, the anti war organization that was, in some ways, it was a huge email list. It was like the first big mass digital politics in America. I think among the first in the world. And then wrote this book coining the term the filter bubble to mean the kind of political bubble that people get into, became very commonly used. Then started this company called Upworthy, which in some ways tried to take advantage of those bubbles, in his view, for good. And so has been sort of on this ride of what is the Internet it like forever. And in this new report, I think he's sort of saying kind of calling the end of an era, the end of this huge mass social era, and thinking really hard about how the very intense personalization possible with AI is going to totally change the way we all consume news, consume entertainment, connect to other people. And he's running a nonprofit. I think that they're trying to think about what is the most positive outcome here. How could you go from this basically insane, wide open moment that we're in into something that feels more human and more connected? And the report kind of takes you on that journey. Yeah.
- [03:38]
Max Tawney
One of the really interesting things that we're gonna hear Eli talk about, and this is how the report is structured, is just essentially how our news media consumption, if you're a news media consumer, is gonna change really, really radically over the next few years from a system where we all kind of open up our phones and maybe some people start with Instagram or some people start with TikTok. The more responsible of us might wa read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal app. And instead of doing something like that, we're going to open up essentially our agents who are going to summarize and tell us essentially what we need to know, essentially mediating the experience between the information that's coming into our phones and what we're seeing. I thought it was a really remarkable and interesting report. And I'm curious to hear more from Eli about what that's exactly going to mean for how we get information and the types of information that's reaching us
- [04:34]
Ben Smith
and for whether we will remain employed of.
- [04:37]
Max Tawney
Of course. Right, exactly. And if that's going to mean the destruction of the media business, which includes semaphore. Well, we'll get to our conversation with Eli Pariser, but we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back after this.
- [04:55]
Ben Smith
Hey, mixed Signals listeners. There's a new podcast we thought you'd enjoy. It's called Frontier cmo. Hosted by our friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing. It's about the forces driving innovation and reshaping the marketing landscape today. Whether it's AI's impact on the industry or creators role in culture, Josh is getting into the weeds with the people who are actually shaping what's next. These are your notes from the Frontier. You'll hear from CMOs, agency legends, brand visionaries and brilliant thinkers. Search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Eli, it's good to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [05:37]
Eli Pariser
Thanks for having me on.
- [05:38]
Ben Smith
And you and I last talked when you were rolling out this deck, which is I think like the new way to release an idea. You just, you don't need a book, you just have a deck.
- [05:46]
Eli Pariser
We'll see.
- [05:46]
Ben Smith
I guess, I wonder if you could just start in plain English, paint a bit of a picture of what you think news and information consumption look like in this, in an AI future.
- [05:58]
Eli Pariser
I guess the starting point for me, and this is the way that we kind of start the deck is just imagining a day in a couple years. How do people get news and information? Where is it coming to them? And our premise is that AI is going to be a kind of central intermediating force for any kind of personally relevant information acquisition that people do in their lives. And we talk about this idea of kind of an agentic interface which for different people is going to look, please
- [06:35]
Ben Smith
explain this without using the words agentic interface.
- [06:37]
Eli Pariser
Okay, sorry, yes, we have these words like medium. Right. But even medium to me suggests like there's a particular form that you're receiving information through. The medium is video, the medium is text. And what's really weird about this era that we're moving into and why it's kind of hard to even come up with the right words, is that it can be any medium. If what you want is to be hearing someone who sounds like Taylor Swift, deliver a song that tells you everything you need to know about your kid's school schedule that is going to be available to you. And if what you want is a video newscast version or what you want is a written briefing that looks like the President's daily briefing, all of those things are available to you. And we'll be able to kind of seamlessly synthesize the most relevant information for you in the way that you prefer to get it. And so I don't know, we call that agentic interface. I kind of hate yet more jargon, but the core idea is that you'll have AI doing a number of jobs, doing this job of consuming a ton of information that you don't need to consume and figuring out which parts of it are relevant, bringing in your personal context, translating that into compelling content and making that available to you in some kind of interactive way. And that's really different, I think, as a paradigm than the one that we've sort of become accustomed to. And so part of what I wanted to do with the deck a little bit was just remind us, you know, sort of like the David Foster Wallace like this is water. Like we've been swimming in the water of big centralized algorithm land for a while and it's easy to imagine that's like a permanent state of affairs. And I actually think we're moving into something that's different.
- [08:31]
Max Tawney
Let's break this down kind of in a similar way to what you do in the deck, which I thought was really fascinating, a little bit chilling, a little bit exciting, a whole lot of emotions kind of all at once. So right now, what I do, unfortunately every day I wake up. The first thing I is I check my phone. Usually I've got some texts from Ben. Cause he wakes up a little bit earlier than me. I scroll, you know, I scroll through the various emails. That's okay, Ben. I scroll through various emails that I've received, newsletters, I read the New York Times app. Maybe I'll listen to a podcast or something like that when I'm kind of getting ready. You envision my day will start a lot differently in a. Either probably not that long of an amount of time because of, you know, because of the way that these things are rapidly changing. Walk us through what my day or the days of our listeners are going to look like through this. In this new world that you envision.
- [09:22]
Eli Pariser
If you think about that set of tasks that you're doing, you're checking text messages, you're looking at some group chats, you're checking some news sites, you're checking some emails. All of these are like information sources that right now you're having to kind of manually seek out. There's a little bit of like you're doing some self direction. But they're living these different kinds of information, are living in these different silos. And I guess the premise here, and if you listen to by the way, Google IO happened I think a few days after we put the deck out and it was like they're Launching a lot of stuff that pushes toward this exact same kind of place that all becomes one seamless experience where it's like we're going to make the Personal Semaphore newsletter just for you, Max, and it's going to have a ranked kind of like what's most relevant and most important for you to know. And probably the Ben texts are still at the top, but maybe Ben is sending you a link to a document and saying, what do you think about this? It's ingesting the document. It's saying, Ben sent you a document that was about the new strategy that has these three main points. You should take a look at it doing a bunch of synthesis so that that surface becomes the primary place that you're paying attention. And part of the reason that we wanted to have Ben in dialogue during the Deck launch was that there's a few of us who have lived through this last era of kind of attention mechanics, attention mongering, and who's paying attention to what is one of the coins of the realm we now all realize. And this interface I think is going to own a lot of our attention and intermediate a lot of those other sources and mix across kind of personal and what we think of as public media context.
- [11:10]
Max Tawney
When is this transition going to happen? Obviously this is going to happen in pieces and kind of slowly. But when do you think my morning routine will look substantially different?
- [11:22]
Eli Pariser
I think even in a year there will be substantial parts of this that we will be starting to rely on. Like just if you think about Google alone, like I see Google trying to do this coming from multiple different angles, where in Gmail they're starting to think past the sort of ranked list of emails as the way that people interact with their email. Right. That's like one dimension. At the same time they're like slowly trying to creep Gemini, toward having more and more access to more and more of your own personal context. And all of that's going to be a place where you begin to be able to cross reference different pieces of data. Gemini just yesterday asked me to be able to see what's going on in all of my tabs and to get a sense of what are my media sources, what am I consuming. And so I think all that's going to start to be really productive and useful, if also creepy and surveillant. And all of us are going to have to make some decisions which are going to be easy to say yes to in the moment because they will be useful about what kinds of information we want to give them but yeah, I would say in a year we're going to start to really see new behaviors in terms of how people are kind of doing their basic morning information routine.
- [12:37]
Ben Smith
If our attention, as you say, is shifting to this new surface that we're all starting to see, but obviously is emerging, what is going away, as you say, been swimming in the water of for me X mostly, but for other people, other social platforms for the last 10, 15 years, what is this going to replace? What's going to go away? And when we look back, say, oh my God, remember back in 2025, 2026, when we were still looking at whatever.
- [13:03]
Eli Pariser
So big parts of the web as we know it are going to kind of get, are being eroded already. And by the way, the part of this conversation that we haven't talked about yet, but it's partly because I just feel like it's a little more obvious, is meanwhile you have this wave of AI generated content also. So it's sort of like the joke where one person takes three bullet points and makes it into a research report, another person takes the research report and makes it into three bullet points, there's going to be a lot of generation and summarization happening across the ecosystem. But I think the other piece that I feel like is under real stress and threat in this context is the feed based information economy. We already know that people are kind of taking their personal lives and moving to the underground, the group chats and the discords and these other places that are sort of like a little more safe and personal. But I think the risk versus reward of putting things out there publicly as a person on an Internet where there are these weaponized agentic tools is going to continue to shift in the direction of people kind of like holding their information and their, their lives pretty, pretty close.
- [14:16]
Max Tawney
You're saying essentially that the feeds that are so much of the part of our lives on the Internet are under threat by this? I guess why would those become kind of less relevant? Isn't kind of part of the fun of the feeds right now that there is some level of discovery of something new and kind of unexpected? And that's the reason why people are coming to these feeds and feeds meaning,
- [14:38]
Ben Smith
I guess, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter.
- [14:41]
Eli Pariser
Yeah. What people do for sort of semi passive entertainment is a really different set of behaviors from what they do to get to know what they need to know in the course of a day. That's sort of useful information. Right. And there's some bleed over between those two. But I would just say like I Feel like, less clear about the future of that, like entertainment and TikTok y use case than I.
- [15:05]
Ben Smith
So we'll still have TikTok. That's a relief.
- [15:07]
Eli Pariser
We'll have something. But again, there's these questions of like, what really is defensible in an AI era and what is not from a kind of video standpoint that I think you really have to scrutinize with some humility. Humility might not be the right word, but that any assumption that AI cannot categorically make a certain kind of content, I feel like is increasingly a bad bet. And so you have to kind of imagine that whatever amount of engagingness, whatever amount of authenticity, and I think Adam Mosseri said something similar recently, just that the notion that humans will be able to out authentic AI, I think is a questionable notion. So it really kind of then raises these questions about mass public communication. And there I feel like volume and the ability to optimize is really powerful.
- [16:01]
Max Tawney
I wanted to actually dig in on your platform's part because one of the things that I thought was most interesting in the deck was you created a list of which platforms you thought were the most exposed to disruption by AI and which ones you thought were the most kind of protected. Can you walk through some of them and explain which ones you thought were the most exposed to disruption by AI and which ones were the most insulated?
- [16:25]
Eli Pariser
So the way that we approached this was that we looked at, you know, we sort of use this jobs to be done idea. Like people go to platforms because they want to be entertained or they want to be connected with other people who have a shared experience or they want to. There are these particular things that people are looking for. So we kind of tried to break it down into all of the component parts of what makes people show up there. I'm bored and I want to be entertained. And then we kind of thought about in which cases might an AI built experience be just as good or better? Maybe because maybe it's sort of a classic disruption thing where it's like not quite as good, but it's twice as available or it's twice as cheap or whatever. Ethan Molluck has this great quote that people use AI when it's better than the best available human. And my therapist is better than Claude, but my therapist isn't available at midnight when I'm stressing out. So the question is, when is AI going to be better able to do some of the jobs that social media does than the best available, easily findable social experience? And I think at the Far end of that spectrum where I think there's going to be a lot of displacement, a lot of YouTube content is I was just trying to replace the wheel on my dishwasher. And the best way to learn that was to get a little video that was some dude showing people how to replace every part in a dishwasher to make a few bucks. I don't know that that's a viable. Putting the manual in my Claude and having Claude tell me was actually way better. And there's a bunch of things like that where really what I'm seeking is a piece of specific information or to complete a specific task where I just think, and I'm not cheerleading this, by the way, but I just think that there's going to be a lot of competitive pressure from AI tools that know more about my personal context, know how I like to learn, and are able to, like, bring that information into my context in a useful way. On the other extreme, so I do think there are these pieces of the big kind of content library and content experience apps that are going to be under threat. On the other extreme, we talk about, when I text my group chat of friends, I do not want my friends agents replying to my texts. That's not the point of the group chat. And maybe our agents someday will have their separate group chat where they gripe about us and figure out how to manage our calendars together so we can actually hang out. But I want to talk to my friends when I want to talk to my friends. And there are a bunch of places in the social web where humans want to talk to humans. And I think those places have a lot more durability in their kind of current form. So something like WhatsApp, which is a community of group chats, there's a lot of durability there because the core use case is not something that I think people are eager to replace with an AI substitute.
- [19:22]
Ben Smith
You were sort of maybe most famous for coining the phrase the filter bubble, which I think really at times has just been the defining experience of particularly political media, just that you live in and all the Democrats and Republicans in the United States live in just totally alternate information environments. And some of the things that you are saying now sound very filter bubbly. Some sound almost the opposite. They sound like you're maybe in a bubble of one and everyone is in a bubble of one. And I'm curious how you how this, and maybe particularly for these purposes, news environment and kind of information environment, how does that connect to that idea of the filter bubble, which I think you rewrote a book in what 2011 called the filter Bubble.
- [19:59]
Max Tawney
Yeah.
- [19:59]
Eli Pariser
The power dynamics are different and there are some ways in which it's just. It will be kind of like a hyper bubble bubble of one phenomenon where I think there are a lot of things that are not yet set about the way that we do this. Right. And part of my interest, I'm like a public interest, public spirited gut. I want a conversation about this because I want us to look at it and shape it. And it's still very shapeable because a whole bunch of things about how this all plays out are not yet set. So just to name my intention, it would be very easy to make this the ultimate self reinforcing epistemic closure machine that AI can convince you you're right. Better than any technology ever has been able to convince you of that and show you all of the evidence. Better than any technology ever has been. On the flip side, I guess one of the things that I won't miss is whether it's Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, a singular monocultural logic that mediates cultural production. Like, I don't think that's been great. I guess I'm with Kyle Filter World.
- [21:09]
Max Tawney
Kyle Chayka.
- [21:11]
Eli Pariser
Kyle Chayka on that.
- [21:12]
Max Tawney
Wait, explain what you mean by that, because I don't follow.
- [21:16]
Eli Pariser
Ultimately, when people learn what the TikTok algorithm, the Facebook algorithm like and build content to support it, I did that for a while. I ran Upworthy and it is not a recipe for a diverse and varied media ecosystem. Right. It's built to uplift a handful of things in different kinds of combinations, but that have to do with surprise or have to do with conflict or have to do with a few other things. I think this is going to be a different kind of a more varied world.
- [21:50]
Ben Smith
And so you're just saying, like, that's a world where every coffee shop looks the same because every coffee shop is chasing the same Instagram sort of juice.
- [21:58]
Eli Pariser
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:59]
Ben Smith
So are we going to get like this? AI produces a world of like more varied coffee shops?
- [22:04]
Eli Pariser
I think it could be because the filters become much more bespoke and weird and idiosyncratic the way that people are.
- [22:13]
Ben Smith
It's a coffee shop where we're the only customer in sit alone, but it's
- [22:16]
Eli Pariser
really cool and weird.
- [22:17]
Max Tawney
Yeah. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Eli, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back with more after this.
- [22:33]
Ben Smith
In this week's branded segment from Think with Google. I talked with Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier about the massive increase in search queries. So, Josh, in Google's last earnings call, the CEO Sundar Pichai said that search for queries that are at an all time high. What's behind that? What's going on there?
- [22:49]
Josh Spanier
So search has always been synonymous with 10 blue links. The reality is today Google search is unbelievably more competent, capable and intelligent than it's ever been before. And what we see under the hood is when consumers use all the advanced features of Google search, when they're planning a trip, when they're booking a meal, when they're investigating quantum tunneling using AI mode, they're actually searching more and more and more, more than they've ever searched before. And they're kind of transitioning from, I think, queries into quests. It used to be you wanted to know a specific piece of information, you just put in a query. Today that query becomes a whole quest, a whole series of deeper and deeper explorations. Using Google's technology. We're way beyond 10 blue links.
- [23:34]
Ben Smith
And what should marketers do about this?
- [23:36]
Josh Spanier
The great thing is that AI has transformed Google search in that there's longer queries, more conversational queries happening. The great news is these quests that people are doing with Google search are resulting in more insights, more signals, more ways to find customers as they're thinking about your product and has their shopping. AI max for search is a year old. It's one of the most successful products launched in Google's history. AI tools, AI systems. Google's AI investment is actually helping marketers find customers for less money and drive more conversions. It's a great thing.
- [24:12]
Ben Smith
Everyone's winning and where can people, where can they quest for more?
- [24:15]
Josh Spanier
Head over to thinkwithgoogle.com and just search for AI Max for search or just AI mode or really anything to do with AI. There's so much great content on thinkwithgoogle.com.
- [24:38]
Ben Smith
You mentioned upworthy. And I've always actually been curious because you write this book, the Filter Bubble about exactly these mechanisms that you're describing. And then, and I was at BuzzFeed at the time, so I'm not sort of, I'm not condemning cynical traffic mongering, but I've always wondered, it felt like you then wrote this book discovering, you know, sort of this terrible technology that distorts the world and then you're like, and I will use it to build a company.
- [24:59]
Eli Pariser
No, I wanted to build a company. That specifically was focused on elevating what we thought was, like, socially valuable, socially. The stuff that people could. Should be paying attention to, but that was not likely to be optimized for algorithmic success. That was.
- [25:17]
Ben Smith
Use the tools for good was the idea.
- [25:18]
Eli Pariser
Yeah, yeah, that was the idea. And then the short version of the story, as you have chronicled and others, is that it turns out that when you get really good at a tool and you're using it for good, but other people are just interested in the tool, which is like a particular form of headline or a particular analysis of where space is in the ecosystem, they can take that tool and do whatever they want with it. And indeed, that's what happened. So there are lessons there about sort of. I don't know, there's a whole. A whole set of philosophical ethics I think, that you could get into about means and ends.
- [25:52]
Max Tawney
But that reminds me a little bit of one of Ben's former employees at BuzzFeed. Maybe not your employees specifically, Ben, but Benny Johnson, who used to work at BuzzFeed. He was just this. He was yours. Okay. You know, I wasn't sure who brought him on, but of course was just this guy who was an expert, you know, at Virality, who, upon leaving buzzfeed, entered on this journey of using those Virality powers for something quite different, which is this kind of political project. No, he never lost his touch for understanding what works well on different platforms. That was true throughout his entire trajectory. Sorry, Ben.
- [26:24]
Ben Smith
You know, one of the things, and I wonder if Eli thought this, because at buzzfeed, Jonah and I definitely had this idea that the era that was defined by, like, the private search box would indulge people's kind of worst impulses. Like, you're in the privacy of search, you can sort of be your worst self, but then in the public space of social media, there'll be a pro social pressure to be like, maybe like in the privacy of search, you're like, you know, someone's looking up their ex girlfriend, but in like, the public space of they're giving to Japanese earthquake victims. That did not. I think that was a deep misread of human nature.
- [26:56]
Eli Pariser
In the end, that was like a
- [26:58]
Ben Smith
fair read for 2012 feeling. Yeah.
- [27:00]
Eli Pariser
I just think these worlds where any few singular people get to decide what billions of people pay attention to are going to be bad worlds, sort of for the same reason that I'm like, anti authoritarianism, anti autocracy. Like, I just think pushing people through big centralized systems as a way to organize stuff tends to go badly partly because some people get good at gaming it. If you look at Elon taking over Twitter and jacking up his own prominence on the platform, there's just a bunch of bad incentives there. And so I think normatively we should want and be excited about opportunities to kind of redistribute algorithmic power out. Not saying that that solves everything, but just saying that I think it creates space for some different kinds of things to happen.
- [27:53]
Max Tawney
I'm curious what you think that these changes mean for news organizations, ones such as these, such as the one that Ben helped found, and that I am an employee at and hope to be for quite some time. I'm curious. It seems like this is obviously going to disrupt this model quite a bit. You said earlier in the episode that I in the morning, instead of waking up and reading my Semaphore newsletter, I might wake up and read all of my information in form of a Semaphore newsletter. What does this mean for media organizations? Yeah, are we totally screwed?
- [28:26]
Eli Pariser
I think it's going to be a no, no lie. Like I think it's going to be a really big reconfiguration of where value is in information production. I do. I like this distinction that Gideon Litchfield makes about summarizable content and unsummarizable content. And the way he describes those categories is like anything that can be summarized but a great Boise Essay, the movie E.T. a novel. You can summarize it, but you lose the essence of the experience in the summarization. And there is still lots of content like that. And as someone cheekily said in my comments, some people call that art. But I think that all of the stuff in that summarizable category, where what people are after is the information inside, not the experience of consuming it, which, let's be honest, is like most news
- [29:25]
Ben Smith
content that describes the entire news business, right?
- [29:30]
Eli Pariser
I think you have to find value sources that are not owning the content layer from that business. And I think that points in some dystopian places. I think that there will be a much more robust business and kind of like sort of intelligence gathering that is windowed so that it first goes to day traders and then goes to public. If I'm doing all this work of being an investive journalist and finding the the takedown story, like, why not make $100,000 selling it to a hedge fund before I then sell it to a public interest media creator or an LLM to share with people in the morning? So I think that there is value in novel intelligence, but it's not the same as the value in the content. And then I think there's value in experience and there's value in community. And I know Semaphore has invested in events and invested in community and I think there remains a lot of value there in this ecosystem. But I also think that media organizations have a mixed record of really knowing how to build and be part of community as opposed to be in this privileged broadcasty mode.
- [30:51]
Max Tawney
So, Eli, you said one other thing that I thought was really interesting in this deck and I'm going to read it to you. You were talking about you AI and kind of these tools that are meant to kind of detect verification is not the answer. It is a fool's errand to investigate where AI ends and humans begin in the agentic interface era. I thought that was really interesting as a story recently that I was working on, you know, was kind of digging into did a certain writer use AI to kind of help with their stuff? And you saw these people pointing out, oh, you know, I fed it into a, you know, an AI tracker and it said 65% likely this was AI, which I have found to be just kind of just basically, essentially pointless. Can you explain why you think that verification isn't the answer here and is essentially pointless?
- [31:43]
Eli Pariser
Yeah. And again, wistfully, I would love to be able to know that I was talking to humans and not to some proportion human. Some proportion AI as a practical technical matter number one, if you talk to people who fight bot networks on social media, they will tell you this is really, really hard. Yeah, there are clear examples where you open a new account. It all sounds like AI from the very beginning. That's AI, but that's not mostly what happens. And mostly what happens are these weirder things where there's an account takeover. Or maybe I actually willingly let an AI bot start to post on my account for various reasons, or I'm using it intentionally or I'm organizing with other people. So the point is, even pre generative AI, this was a hard thing that a lot of people were like, oh, that's actually easy now though I guess I just really don't even know what it means as a category. I'm thinking about the New York magazine article where the girl in college knew that she was going to get kicked out of her class if she used AI to write her paper. So she had AI write her a detailed outline and then she sat there writing in her own words, sentence after sentence that was essentially being structured by the AI. There's going to be A ton of that. And it's like if you're. And is it AI made or human made? If I use link, if I'm going to do a LinkedIn post and I ask Claude for feedback, if I have it, write a first draft and I write a second, it just gets super duper messy in a way that I think is irreconcilably complicated. So I think, can you verify that at some point down the line there was a specific original human involved with this particular account? That's probably doable. But can you verify that any particular piece of content is like 100% guaranteed human? It gets really hard or it gets very niche. It's like, well, we got you this special camera that's cryptographically signed. That's going to. I think there will be a category that's like that, but I can't imagine that that's the dominant category.
- [34:05]
Max Tawney
Ben, I actually have a question for you. As a journalist, as a, you know, in some ways, sometimes someone who has been a media ethicist in an informal way, do you think that people are just going to stop caring about things that are. That are AI written? Like right now, it is a scandal if some journalist uses AI and publishes something that has large blocks of text that are, you know, somewhat AI written. But it seems like most of the world is starting to do this in some way. It's kind of hard to track it. Do you think that. Do you see things headed that way?
- [34:34]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I really agree with Eli, and I think I actually agree with the people who don't care. I mean, it's like, I care if you vouch for this. I care if it reflects your intent. Do I care if you use Grammarly? Like, of course not. And I think, like, those questions, to me, it's much more about intent and about sort of ownership than about which tools you use to write it. It almost feels like kind of a twee preoccupation of writers and sort of pride of writing, which, by the way, certainly for journalists, I think maybe novelists are different for journalists. I'm not hiring you because you're a good writer, honestly, sort of, who cares? I mean, you're, of course, a lovely writer, but I'm hiring you. You're a great reporter. And if you're a great reporter who struggles to write and you want to use AI to help you write, I just don't care. Am I gonna get in trouble for that?
- [35:18]
Max Tawney
No. I mean, look, this'll be great. When somebody comes to you and they say, oh, Max is Using AI.
- [35:23]
Ben Smith
I would say I'm being consistent. I replaced Max with a bot years ago. He's too busy podc.
- [35:28]
Eli Pariser
This is the way that some of this stuff will shake out is it's like, well, ultimately you're accountable for the quality of your product. And what that means is that if you did use AI and it made up a quote and the quote is wrong, then you're fired. Like, right. It doesn't matter that you were. You can't blame it on your AI. You're signing up to be accountable. Right.
- [35:49]
Max Tawney
I think before we move on from this topic to the kind of less dystopian, you know, kind of rosier view, I want to kind of linger on something that you said earlier as well, which is about. And this is something. Something also that's in the. In. In the presentation. You talk about a lot about this kind of life cycle of creation of content on online and how AI is going to be involved in every single aspect of it. You know, when we had Adam Mosseri on this podcast a while back and I asked him about what he's doing to stop the flood of AI slop on his platform, he basically said, we're concerned about AI slop, but we're also just concerned about slop in general. We don't really care if it was created by AI or regular humans creating slop. Yeah. Are you concerned. Are other people at other platforms concerned about the mass proliferation of slop and kind of what's to be done about the fact that it's a lot easier to create and put content out in the world at scale?
- [36:45]
Eli Pariser
We're moving into a world of, like, roughly infinite content. And I think some of the slop conversation is kind of like the uncanny Valley era of moving into that world where it's noticeably bad. And I guess I assume that it's going to get much, much better. Right.
- [37:03]
Ben Smith
It's going to be like, delicious slop.
- [37:05]
Eli Pariser
It's going to. Well, it's not going to be slop. It'll be whatever the form factor is, I guess. I assume. Not to, like, belabor the point or make anyone feel sad, but like, that the idea of write me a Semaphore newsletter that's as good as the semaphore newsletter, but it's my version that will be doable. Right. The intelligence, the reporting is the big question, the information sources. But the forum. I don't know that any forum, a New Yorker article or whatever is going to be permanently unable to be fabricated by AI to a point where it kind of passes the Turing test. And that's not to say that there aren't important subjective sources of value that only humans have. I'm really not cheerleading this, but I just think it's important to reckon with if what you want is a healthy information ecosystem. Because I think a lot of people imagine that there are moats around the content or moats around but only humans can do X that I think we shouldn't rely on in order to get where we want to go. We need to not take false reassurance
- [38:14]
Ben Smith
in those, as often happens in these conversations. Spend a lot of time talking about the dystopian outcome. And one of the things I enjoyed about our conversation before is that you've really thought a lot about the sort of utopian alternative. And I'm curious and can you lay out for us the positive media future here?
- [38:30]
Eli Pariser
There's a lot of value in a world of kind of like many well functioning micro publics with different ways of interacting that aren't all pushed through one centralized platform. And that's one of the things that we're already, I think, starting to see emerge. But it's sort of like what if each group chat had the opportunity to build its own sort of quasi platform features, right? So that if you're interested in running, there's a bunch of ways of pulling your running group's data into context with each other in a way that strengthens your running community. Or if you're interested in having a hyperlocal conversation and we're thinking about this at new public, like you can really do that in a way that serves your community that doesn't, that isn't downstream from kind of arbitrary metrics around engagement, around advertising views or whatever that were set in place by someone else. I think that can be really good because I think like one of the saddest things tracking from the beginning of social media to now is how like not social, it's gotten very not social. Everyone's pushed toward the for you page and like kind of this passive experience. And there was a moment in 2018 where Mark Zuckerberg sort of like felt bad about that and then he didn't anymore. But the people connecting to people part was never where the big dollars were because the big dollars were with the attention and the attention was with the like snacky content. And the snacky content I think is like not really great for us is what the sciences. So the opportunity to rebuild out that world without having to worry as much about venture economics and instead worry about what are the Affordances and design patterns that help communities be good communities. That's really exciting, I think. And that's more possible than it was. And especially in a world of super slop and super AI everything, I think people are really going to be looking for that. How do I hang out with other humans? I like this metaphor of chess. Chess is a place where we have superintelligence. Right. AI superintelligence exists in chess. Chess is also more popular than it's ever been. And even though people can use AI to win, that is not the point. And you do not get friends in the chess community, which is the point if you are doing that. And so people play chess with people because they like doing stuff with people. And there are a lot of cases where that's like, those are places where there's a lot of value to humans, to society, and I think we can really build there.
- [41:09]
Ben Smith
It sounds like what you're talking about is a kind of extreme fragmentation of culture. I mean, maybe our culture could used to be a little fragmented, but if you think about that, it's like a very different world and maybe a world in which you've stopped trying for kind of a shared truth and a shared reality. Like these are filtered, not filter bubbles, but like filter planets.
- [41:29]
Eli Pariser
Yeah. I mean, I think which honestly, like most of human history has been more like that than now. Like, and I used to long time back be doing MoveOn and politics, and I kind of look back at the federalization of American politics and I kind of feel like, oof, that was not net good for us that we moved all this attention away from local towns where people can actually have a big impact and towards a big what's happening in the Situation Room that like, I'm never going to be able to impact. And so I think there is something valuable in more smaller spaces that people have more control of as a kind of design principle. Arguably, that's like the design principle of federalism in the United States. And like, maybe that's something we can move toward a bit in this next attention era.
- [42:18]
Max Tawney
Well, that feels like a great place to leave it. Eli, thank you for both scaring us and at the end, giving us a little bit of hope.
- [42:25]
Ben Smith
I'm not sure. It made me hopeful. It's fascinating. Thank you, Eli.
- [42:29]
Eli Pariser
I tried. Thank you.
- [42:39]
Ben Smith
We talk a lot on this show about reading the mixed signals of the media landscape. But when you need a clear signal for your marketing strategy, where do you go think with Google is there to help help while everyone else is guessing how AI changes the game in 2026, think with Google is publishing the actual playbook that includes next level consumer insights, guidance on creating, capturing and converting demand and data backed strategies that move you from experimenting with AI to actually driving profitability with it. You can read all that and more@thinkwithgoogle.com.
- [43:16]
Max Tawney
So Ben, at the end of our interview I thought, you know, we ended it on a slightly hopeful note. This return to the kind of small communities away from the big platforms where any one person can speak to the entire world. You didn't think that Eli's view was as rosy even in his most optimistic, through his most optimistic lens. Did that talk in the deck? Did that terrify you both as a business owner of media and also as a human being existing in the world world?
- [43:47]
Ben Smith
It's actually neither really. More as the kind of journalist I've spent my whole career as, which is somebody who's kind of, I've kind of ridden the wave of digital media toward this radical centralization and the notion of something that splinters back into like the world. At the very beginning of my career I worked for the Indianapolis Star, which was this very powerful newspaper in Indianapolis and nowhere else is like really it's very disorienting for me. Like it's been a one way ride and it has started to splinter. Right. And I think what we're doing at Semaphore actually is a reflection of a more splintered universe. But the notion of that really radical everybody is back into small communities and there's not even really a place for reality to be shared. And that that could happen very fast. I mean, it's very disorienting. Think about among other things, the kind of political ramifications of that.
- [44:32]
Max Tawney
That's really interesting.
- [44:33]
Ben Smith
It's funny because I was thinking your taste actually often runs to the small communities, the niche. I know like some of your favorite guests have been like the Blackbird spy plane guy, like people who are trying to get away from the, the big social platforms.
- [44:47]
Max Tawney
It's true. I've actually, I've kind of, kind of thought about that and how that in some ways hinders me as a journalist because sometimes I, my tendency is towards the more niche stuff and everybody's interested in this big stuff. And I'm kind of like, oh well, what's that over there? That's actually kind of more interesting because it's bizarre and it's away from everything. But I actually don't know if I totally agree with the idea that it's going to make cultural products more niche because we've actually gotten, we've optimized more for improving, targeting people's tastes. Right. Like we see this in music. Spotify is already, and Apple are already incredible at recommending you music based on the stuff that you're listening to in your library. And yet when you look at the charts and you look at the way that certain music trends have played out over the last several years, we've seen the not rise of Taylor Swift, but the explosion of interest in Taylor Swift a few years ago and all of these records that she was breaking and, and we saw this to a certain degree and with some big movie events, I think that the algorithmic pushing us into our silos actually made people want to engage in these big mass monocultural events. So you definitely see the push and pull between people wanting to go into their small communities and also people wanting to participate in these broad cultural kind of moments and discussions.
- [46:09]
Ben Smith
One thing that really struck me was at the end, I mean, Eli is one of the architects of American mass politics. He was the director of Move on right after 911 and really created the first big digital political thing like anywhere in history. This huge email list that was central to the anti war movement. And I was actually kind of stunned to hear him say that in retrospect, that turned out to be the wrong direction because he's lived a bunch of lives in digital media and that's a really defining moment.
- [46:38]
Max Tawney
Well, Ben, I think the place where I think we should end this is of course about ourselves. As someone who is running a media business that produces a lot of text, a lot of it that is delivered to people in their inboxes, are you concerned about the changes that definitely seem like they're already happening in terms of summarization and regurgitation by AI? And do you think that media companies, publishers are gonna go along with this? Will they survive these changes or will there have to be some sort of or agreement reached between the AI tech platforms and the people producing content that it wants to use?
- [47:16]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think you can wait a long time for crumbs from the big tech platforms to save your media business. And I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, I guess. And I mean email, obviously we send great emails and I think we're like probably like we put a lot of work into these emails. Like as AI starts chewing up emails that are sort of easily summarized and spit back out. I hope we've got all. We're not infinitely defended against that, but maybe we've Got some time. But actually the way I think about it is just that there are these core things about journalism. Great reporters, great stories, things you didn't know, those are defensible, those are real. But then what surface does that live on? Where and how do people consume that? I think you have to be sort of infinitely flexible and sort of open to a notion that that's going to change a lot in the next three to five years. I mean, and certainly that makes me feel really great about live journalism. I think bringing people together in a physical, live moment is pretty hard. It remains quite challenging for AI and about great reporters connecting very, very directly, whether it's through email, through some other medium. But I think almost everything else is on the table.
- [48:21]
Max Tawney
I want to say one other thing on this, and this is just kind of my own personal.
- [48:25]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I want to know, do you buy this? You have a longer career than me.
- [48:30]
Max Tawney
I think I do. I'm a little bit concerned that I've got about 30 years on the clock at least. So I feel like things, my job's probably gonna change a little bit. But you know what I really think is it's true that if I wanna get the news as quickly and effectively as possible, if I wanna get information as quickly and effectively as possible, obviously a three bullet point summary will do that. But if I wanna remember something, I think that narrative storytelling is still kind of the best way to do that. I think that taking someone on a journey that, that exists in kind of a narrative form and delivers information that way, it's much more memorable than a series of bullet points saying, this thing happened, this thing happened, this thing happened. Right.
- [49:09]
Ben Smith
That's why you can ask Claude to rewrite it as a New Yorker article. Yeah, but like, I think that's a ways away.
- [49:16]
Max Tawney
Yeah, I think so. I think so too. Well, that's it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal with special thanks to Josh Billenson, Amber Ali, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pisino, Daniel Haft, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by the great Steve Bone. Our public editor is whoever is regurgitating this podcast and spitting out three bullet points for somebody to, I don't know, consume quickly.
- [49:53]
Ben Smith
But if you're consuming it at length. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts like and subscribe on YouTube.
- [49:59]
Max Tawney
And if you want more, you can always Sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.