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Thursday, March 16, 2023

The close of the week is within grasp. TikTok faces more pressure, Muck Rack survey offers look at the state of journalism, Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg, right-wing narrative about SVB gets debunked, Taylor Swift surprises with midnight drop of new tracks, and so much more. But first, the A1.

THE A1

Anxiety About A.I.

CNN Photo Illustration/Adobe Stock

The A.I. revolution has arrived.

The technology — which conjures up feelings of wonder, fear, excitement, and uncertainty — is on the precipice of permanently reshaping society. Some say, for the better. Others caution that it could spiral out of control and birth a dystopian reality resembling those depicted in science fiction movies such as "Terminator" and "The Matrix."

How quickly the technology will radically transform society is anyone's guess. A few months ago, ChatGPT couldn't pass the bar exam. Today, it can not only do so, but it can pass the test with flying colors. Which is to say that the technology is advancing at a break-neck speed.

Regardless, this week has been a monumental one for the technology: OpenAI released GPT4; Microsoft said it will implement the technology in its Office apps; Google said it will integrate its own A.I. into its suite of apps, such as Google Docs and Gmail; and Elon Musk wondered amid it all, "What will be left for us humans to do?"

Even OpenAI boss Sam Altman is expressing some fears about the ramifications this technology could have on the world, telling ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis in an interview that aired Thursday that he is "worried" it might "be used for large-scale disinformation" and "offensive cyberattacks" — not to mention potentially displacing countless jobs.

"I think over a couple of generations, humanity has proven that it can adapt wonderfully to major technological shifts," Altman said. "But if this happens in a single-digit number of years, some of these shifts ... That is the part I worry about the most."

To offer a fuller assessment of how this technology will soon upend our world, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the smartest pieces on the subject published over the last few days:

► Ezra Klein's "This Changes Everything": "I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. There was the difficulty of living in exponential time, the impossible task of speeding policy and social change to match the rate of viral replication. I suspect that some of the political and social damage we still carry from the pandemic reflects that impossible acceleration. There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time."

► Kevin Roose's "GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary": "Today, GPT-4 may not seem all that dangerous. But that's largely because OpenAI has spent many months trying to understand and mitigate its risks. What happens if it's testing missed a risky emergent behavior? Or if its announcement inspires a different, less conscientious A.I. lab to rush a language model to market with fewer guardrails? ... The worst A.I. risks are the ones we can't anticipate. And the more time I spend with A.I. systems like GPT-4, the less I'm convinced that we know half of what's coming."

► Charlie Warzel's "What Have Humans Just Unleashed?": "Trying to find the perfect analogy to contextualize what a true, lasting AI revolution might look like without falling victim to the most overzealous marketers or doomers is futile. In my conversations, the comparisons ranged from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the advent of the internet or social media. But one comparison never came up, and I can't stop thinking about it: nuclear fission and the development of nuclear weapons."

► Gary Marcus' "Why Are We Letting the AI Crisis Just Happen?": "Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots. GPT-3 produces more plausible outputs than GPT-2, and GPT-4 will be more powerful than GPT-3. And none of the automated systems designed to discriminate human-generated text from machine-generated text has proved particularly effective."

► Ryan Broderick's "Building A Portal to Everything": "Simply put, every new era of technology is eventually beaten down by market forces into the recognizable shape of the previous. In 2010s, the internet became television. And so, I think it's reasonable to assume that in the 2020s, thanks to generative AI, the internet will become one big personalized web portal. A place that feels 'alive' but is actually completely walled off from other human beings."

——— BELOW THE FOLD ———

CNN Photo Illustration/Adobe Stock

ByteDance in a Bind: TikTok is being battered by a series of bad headlines — and Thursday was no different. Forbes' Emily Baker-White, who's done some of the most impactful reporting on the platform, reported that the FBI and DOJ are probing parent company ByteDance over its employees' use of the app to spy on journalists. "We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us," ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks told Baker-White. You can read the full story here.

► Meanwhile, the UK banned TikTok from government phones. And France is planning on recommending ministers avoid using the app on their work devices, Bloomberg's Ania Nussbaum and Benoit Berthelot report.

► Will TikTok's Chinese owners sell the app, as the Biden administration has demanded, to continue operating in the U.S.? CEO Shou Zi Chew would not say, but told The WSJ's Stu Woo that he doesn't believe it would resolve national security concerns. And The NYT's Sapna Maheshwari and David McCabe report that "finding a buyer" for the company "may not be so easy."

► One company's misfortunes are another company's win: Meta ended Thursday trading ⬆️ 4% and Snap ended the day ⬆️ 7%.

THE BUSINESS

The State of Play: Muck Rack has released the results of its annual State of Journalism survey. The final report drew on interviews from more than 2,200 journalists across the world. "With the industry facing issues like wavering trust in the media, threats to free press and lack of funding, it's hard to recall a more challenging time for journalism," Muck Rack CEO Gregory Galant said. "This survey sheds light on the deep responsibility journalists have to deliver news and information to the public and how they're managing it with limited resources." Some highlights of the survey:

► Two out of three journalists said economic uncertainty had impacted their work, with 22% saying that they have made a career change as a result of it and 21% saying that layoffs had increased their workload.

► The primary concerns plaguing the industry identified by respondents? "Lack of funding" and "disinformation" were tied for the top spot. "Trust in journalism and media" came in third.

► 90% of journalists surveyed said they remain on Twitter. That said, Elon Musk's hostile takeover of the social media company appears to be giving them second thoughts. 50% said they have considered leaving the platform in the past year.

► Only 9% of journalists selected TikTok as their most valuable social network, far below Twitter (78%), Facebook (34%), LinkedIn (32%), Instagram (24%), YouTube (19%), and Reddit (10%). But 22% said they plan to spend more time on TikTok this year.

IN THE INDUSTRY

Charlotte Klein nabs an interview with ABC News boss Kim Godwin. "It's very easy to Monday-morning quarterback and second-guess," Godwin said, referring to the TJ Holmes-Amy Robach scandal. (Vanity Fair)
The LAT will no longer use the word "internment" to describe the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII. (LAT)
Amazon will stop selling Kindle and print newspaper and magazine subscriptions. (NiemanLab)
Michael Grynbaum argues that "the new prime time for TV news" is in the afternoons. (NYT)
"Jake Tapper knows there's no such thing as purely objective news": As "The Lead" celebrates its 10th anniversary on air, Tapper talks to Jack Holmes about what he's learned over the past decade. (Esquire)
NBC News' Savannah Sellers opens up about her mental health: "For a long time, my family and I thought I was 'nervous' or 'stressed,' but it was more than that. It was undiagnosed anxiety disorder." (Teen Vogue)

MEDIA MOVES

IMAX said boss Megan Colligan will step down. (The Wrap)
CNBC tapped Osman Ansari as senior vice president of business transformation. (Talking Biz News)
The LAT named Julia Turner senior vice president of content business strategy. (LAT)
The WaPo hired Kara Voght, Jesús Rodríguez, and Marianne LeVine as politics reporters. (WaPo/WaPo/WaPo)

THE VALLEY

CNN Photo Illustration/David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

What the Zuck?: Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday got a taste of how some of his employees are feeling after another round of brutal layoffs. The Meta chief held a town hall with staffers where he was confronted with questions about his leadership, The WaPo's Naomi Nix reported Thursday. "I would guess that the way people would evaluate whether you trust me and want to work at this company in whether we are succeeding in making progress toward the overall stated goals," Zuckerberg told staffers, according to an audio recording of the meeting that Nix obtained. Zuckerberg was also pressed on why a second round of layoffs were executed months after 11,000 employees were cut in the fall. Zuckerberg said it was because he believed the poor economic conditions tech companies like Meta are navigating will be around for some time, Nix reported. Read Nix's full story here.

TOO MANY TABS

TikTok will allow users to refresh their "For You" feeds, allowing users a chance to see different content. (Bloomberg)
Microsoft will integrate OpenAI's GPT-4 into its Office suite in the coming months. (Bloomberg)
Baidu CEO Robin Li acknowledged that the company's AI, Ernie bot, isn't as good as ChatGPT — but emphasized its potential as a Chinese-language alternative. (CNBC)
In the wake of SVB's collapse, crypto apps have seen a 15% download boom. (TechCrunch)
The price of YouTube TV is going up. The service will now cost users $72.99 per month, up from $64.99. (CNBC)
Emmett Shear will step down as Twitch CEO. (TechCrunch)

THE INFO WARS

CNN Photo Illustration/ai Sugano/The Mercury News/Getty Images

The 'Woke' Hoax: Right-wing media has run wild with a claim that Silicon Valley Bank donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter — a claim that fact checkers have poured cold water on. Judd Legum, who noted the erroneous claim saturated Fox News' airwaves, wrote for his Popular Information newsletter Thursday that "an examination of the underlying data" failed to support the claim. The Associated Press' Philip Marcelo also debunked the claim here.

🔎 Zooming in: The claim is part of a much broader narrative being pushed by right-wing media to assert that SVB's sudden collapse was a result of a supposed obsession with "wokeness" that distracted the bank. Experts have, unsurprisingly, shot down the claims, pointing to a host of other factors that led to the bank's implosion.

IN THE BATTLEFIELD

As the network is rocked by the election lies scandal, AT&T has returned to Fox News as an advertiser. As Matt Gertz wrote, "It's an unusual time to launch an ad campaign on Fox." (MMFA)
Sarah Ellison and Amy Gardner write about how Sidney Powell and a "wackadoodle" email are at the center of Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News. (WaPo)
Defamation attorney Sandy Bohrer says Fox News could face massive exposure in the Dominion lawsuit on punitive damages: "It's a very, very unsympathetic defendant," he told Clare Malone. "I have never seen this bad a case for a defendant. Ever." (New Yorker)
Melissa Gira Grant reports on the librarians fighting back against right-wing efforts to ban books. (New Republic)
Hours after telling Steve Bannon that MyPillow was going broke, CEO Mike Lindell says the company is doing just fine. (Daily Beast)
Netflix has stopped advertising on the right-wing video-sharing website Rumble after Media Matters brought the issue to attention. (Forward)

CURTAIN CALL

CNN Photo Ilustration/Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Taylor's Tracks: Good news for the Swifties: Taylor Swift is set to drop four unreleased songs at midnight. "In celebration of 'The Eras Tour' I'm releasing four previously unreleased songs tonight at midnight," Swift wrote on Instagram. The surprise announcement comes on the eve of the first show in the much-anticipated tour. CNN's Alli Rosenbloom has more here.

OFF STAGE

The WGA is set to meet with studios Monday and "high on the agenda is setting a minimum staffing level for writers rooms," Gene Maddaus reports. (Variety)
Paramount+ is launching a first-ever mobile only plan in Mexico and Brazil. (Deadline)
Fox Corp. will expand its Fox Studio Lot in Century City as it eyes increased production. (THR)
"No date has been set for Alec Baldwin's criminal trial ... but the resurrected ['Rust'] is now looking at a late April production start," Anthony D'Alessandro and Dominic Patten report. (Deadline)
Richard Newby writes about the "last gasps" of the old DC Universe, which is "coming to an end, almost poetically, a decade after it made its debut." (THR)
Stephen Sondheim's anticipated — and incomplete — Luis Buñuel musical will come to New York in fall 2023. (NYT)
A24 acquires the international rights to concert film "Stop Making Sense," which will hit theaters again in 2023. (Deadline)
The cast of HBO Max's "The Penguin" series is starting to shape up, with Theo Rossi, Michael Zegen, James Madio, and Scott Cohen joining the project. (Deadline/Variety)
More good news for James Cameron: "Titanic" is set to coast into China for its 25th anniversary. (Deadline)
Bruce Campbell sparred with a heckler during a Q&A for his film "Evil Dead Rise" at SXSW. (Deadline)

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino and produced with the assistance of Liam Reilly. Have feedback? Send us an email here. We will see you back in your inbox next week.