Personally, I’m happy that autocomplete for email exists. If my kid has to write some goofy templated email — like a formal apology for being late to a class they don’t care about — great, hit autocomplete, tweak the results, and be done.
But then I’m always going to ask them: “What did you do with the time you saved?”
Because let’s be real: No child a hundred years ago had to waste time writing pointless emails. So now that you’ve reclaimed that lost time, how did you spend it?
We have to actively decide how we’re going to introduce AI into our lives and how we’re going to interact with it.
We’re an AI-friendly household, obviously. My kids have full access to ChatGPT, image-generation tools, all of that stuff. But they don’t use it much — they don’t care. They’d rather draw, write their own stories, read each other’s stories out loud, and proudly show us things they’ve created themselves. Why would they replace that with ChatGPT?
As their parents, we appreciate their original creations, and they appreciate each other’s work too. Those creations become part of our family culture — not labor, but something meaningful.
If someone’s stuck doing repetitive, low-value labor — especially something mundane like certain kinds of emails — please, press a button, automate it, and then use the time you save for something meaningful. That’s my real goal.
I definitely don’t want my kids to cheat, but I also don’t want them wasting their time. A lot of our educational system currently trains kids to waste time. So if AI can help them avoid that, that’s genuinely valuable.
My co-founder, Devin Wenig, and I are people with deep expertise in a specific industrial process — news production. News production is highly structured, especially at enterprise scale for large newsrooms. A piece of content typically moves through multiple phases, touched by many different hands along the way.
RELATED: Jim Acosta is getting torched for 'grotesque' interview with AI version of child killed at Parkland massacre
We’re basically graybeards (literally!) in a particular industry that has accumulated a lot of inefficiencies. So we’re applying this new technology to reduce those inefficiencies in a phased industrial workflow, resulting in an industrial product that people consume as news.
Now, there’s an ethical aspect to all this — similar to debates around industrial farming: Is it good? Is it nutritious? I guess I’m implicated in that.
Right now, much of what gets published as news comes from reporters juggling a dozen tabs at once, repackaging existing information into content that’s mostly designed to get clicks.
When you introduce AI into this scenario, it can play out two different ways, and everyone here probably knows what they are.
My hope is that it leads to something like, “I’ve reclaimed some time as a reporter. I can pick up the phone and call a source, or write something deeper, longer, and more meaningful.” That’s one possibility.
The other possibility is, “Well, now you’ve got extra time, so crank out 80 more pieces of the same shallow content.”
Which direction newsrooms choose will be their responsibility.
What my startup aims to do is give every journalist more productivity per unit of time — whether they’re processing municipal bond reports, covering earnings season, or similar repetitive tasks. Ideally, newsroom editors will then encourage journalists to use the reclaimed time for deeper reporting: calling sources, traveling to do on-the-ground reporting, and producing higher-quality journalism. Hopefully they don’t just say, “Great, now we can lay off half the newsroom and push the remaining staff even harder.”
I can definitely think of other examples that might also qualify as anti-culture. But ultimately, I think it will be whatever we choose to make of it. We have to actively decide how we’re going to introduce AI into our lives and how we’re going to interact with it.
Luckily, we dodged a bullet with the centralized versus decentralized AI debate. Because we have open-weight models and decentralized tools — which almost got banned — we now have leverage and an opportunity to steer this technology. We have a window right now to choose how we adopt and guide its use.
A version of this article was published at jonstokes.com.
On the latest episode of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi discuss the recent collapse of the corporate media, attributing it to the industry's shift in coverage strategies in response to Donald Trump's first presidential election.
During this time, the press moved in lockstep to promote the Russian collusion allegations against Trump, while simultaneously suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. Later, the corporate media also collaborated to stifle COVID-era lockdown skepticism and the lab leak theory.
'You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air.'
Taibbi, one of the investigative journalists behind the Twitter Files, told Kibbe, "When Trump arrived, there was a belief that the old-school, objective form of journalism, where we tell you the stuff and you do what you want with it — that was the tradition for ages in America — that had to go out the window," Taibbi told Kibbe. "Now, it was too important. Trump was too dangerous."
Taibbi rejected this change, adding that "journalists should have distance from politics, even if we were opinionated." Instead of working in competition with one another, journalists began operating "as a team," he explained.
"It's anathema to how journalism, I think, is supposed to work," he continued. "I quickly found myself on the outs."
Kibbe credited the Twitter Files for revealing that a nonprofit organization had been "groom[ing] reporters to sing from the same song sheet and suppress stories before they even happened."
Taibbi stated that a group of the country's most prominent national security reporters were invited in 2016 to "war game what would happen if a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma and a laptop came out."
"This was months before the story came out," Taibbi said, noting that the reporters agreed to participate in the event off the record.
RELATED: Matt Taibbi looking to make congresswoman pay big-time for repeating her smear online
Kibbe described some reporters as "useful idiots."
"Maybe that's not fair," Kibbe said.
"No, I think it's worse than that," Taibbi remarked. "I think they're essentially proxies for the national security apparatus."
Taibbi stated that there are entire news organizations that have relationships with federal government agents, allowing for "a superhighway of information."
"One is broadcasting PR for the other, and beyond that, they're hiring people," he continued. "You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air."
Taibbi called it "a complete corruption and a complete breakdown of the system." He explained how the media suppresses stories.
RELATED: The media’s misinformation machine is built to last — here’s why
"If you go to work in these big organizations, it's not like anybody tells you, 'Okay, don't write this story, and do write that story,'" he said. "Over time, the values of the organization, they're sort of suffused through the entire bureaucracy. And even at the very lowest level, as a cub reporter, you learn very quickly what your editors want and what they don't want."
"You just learn, 'Well, this is what's gonna get me promoted. This is what's gonna get me a better gig.' And you start writing those stories," he added.
Taibbi noted that reporters with "difficult personalities wash out eventually."
He concluded that the "corporate media is done now" because "they've now screwed up so many stories."
"Even if they try to reorient themselves in the direction of journalism, they're gonna have to start at square one. And they're gonna be beaten out by all these independent sources that are already way ahead of them," Taibbi said.
Blaze News asked Taibbi how he sees the evolution of America's media landscape over the next decade, considering that corporate outlets are experiencing a significant credibility crisis.
"Obviously independent sources will benefit both from a trust standpoint and in terms of audience as the corporate press deals with fallout from mistakes and politicized coverage," he responded.
"The U.S. has a long history of innovating new journalism forms, and I'm pretty confident something great will emerge. However, the new media landscape still hasn't figured out how to monetize long-form investigative reporting, nor does it have the ability to fund full-time beat writers or foreign bureaus yet," Taibbi stated. "So there are serious gaps."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
An alarming development from the depths of the media swamp has been brought to light by UnHerd’s Emily Jashinsky, who dropped a bombshell this week: Leaked documents expose Punchbowl News for offering corporations “editorial influence” — for the right price.
Jashinsky posted a brief overview of the expose on X, writing: “Breaking Points got ahold of a leaked pitch deck from Punchbowl News. The document reveals how they allow corporations to buy influence over editorial decisions.”
“WH told us several subscriptions were canceled by the Trump admin as well. We also have their numbers: They’ve charged corporate sponsors $210,000 for a week of email ads. You can see the pricing sheet, with subscriber numbers and open rates below,” Jashinsky continued.
Christopher Bedford, Blaze Media’s D.C. correspondent and senior editor for politics, isn’t surprised in the slightest.
“It’s the new journalism, same as the old journalism,” Bedford tells Matthew Peterson and Jill Savage on “Blaze News Tonight.”
“Punchbowl are essentially unregistered lobbyists,” he continues. “If Punchbowl was good at its job, then corporations wouldn’t actually need to hire lobbyists, they would be able to read that newsletter, maybe pay a premium.”
“What they often do, they push these different issues, advocacy things, they push their agenda, they spread Capitol Hill gossip, which is, you know, fun, but not necessarily that helpful, and they create all these false cliffs and these false deadlines,” he adds.
But that’s not all.
“Their reporting has been suffering,” Bedford explains. “Pedaling influence, selling influence, it’s kind of the game. And for so much of Washington, it’s really disgusting.”
To enjoy more provocative opinions, expert analysis, and breaking stories you won’t see anywhere else, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Scott Pelley's sickening, self-important speech shows he has long forgotten that truth and journalism are best served with humility.
You can't have a healthy society without events like the Derby and the sense of shared heritage that they produce.
'Once you realize Pulitzers are awarded for propaganda, it’s kind of funny to see who wins and who loses." -The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway.
Does the propaganda press want us to forget Trump was shot and that there are still unanswered questions?
One cannot overstate just how much influence the corporate media has over the majority of leftists. No wonder they're shocked once again.
The 'right-wing media ecosystem' exists only in reaction to the left’s complete dominance of legacy media.
www.theblaze.com