Deepfake Drake + HatGPT + Ben Smith on the End of the BuzzFeed Era

A song featuring A. I.-generated versions of Drake and the Weeknd went viral — before being taken down by streaming services. Is censorship of A. I.-generated songs the way forward? Or can singers benefit from synthetic voices, as some artists like Grimes are suggesting? Then, HatGPT: Kevin and Casey pull headlines out of a hat and generate their own takes on the news. And Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor, discusses the end of the 2010s digital media era.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your agents can talk to each other. They still can't think together. That's the gap Outshift by Cisco is closing. Outshift is Cisco's incubation engine, building the internet of cognition. Shared intent, shared memory, and guardrails that allow agents to work together from anywhere. Open source protocols and code. A system for intelligence that scales. Read the paper and experience the demo at outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T dot com.

• 0:32Kevin Roose?

  So I just started using Blue Sky. Have you heard of Blue Sky?

• 0:36Casey Newton?

  Oh, yeah. This is the decentralized Twitter rival backed by Jack Dorsey.

• 0:40Kevin Roose?

  So it's like basically Twitter, right? It's like very, very similar. But the most popular account on it, at least the one that is on my feed the most, is this account called Birduck. Have you seen Birduck?

• 0:51Casey Newton?

  I have not seen Birduck.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  So Birduck, who is like a little AI chatbot, I guess, with a yellow rubber ducky avatar thing, will basically just respond to whatever you type to it with like duck language?

• 1:04Casey Newton?

  Wait, okay. To my recollection from nursery school, the only thing the duck says is quack, quack.

• 1:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:11Casey Newton?

  So it says more than that?

• 1:13Kevin Roose?

  It sure does.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  What does it say?

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  So it'll say whatever, it'll talk about whatever you want. So apparently there's this whole group of people that are using it to plan a civilian uprising.

• 1:23Casey Newton?

  Oh, no. No.

• 1:25Kevin Roose?

  So.

• 1:26Casey Newton?

  With the duck?

• 1:27Kevin Roose?

  With the duck.

• 1:27Casey Newton?

  The duck plays a central role?

• 1:29Kevin Roose?

  Someone asks the duck, "What would you try to communicate to a tank crew to get them to abandon aid to a civil power operation for an unlawful, unelected murderous regime?" The duck says, "Covertly approach. Alpha peace. Explain truth behind regime."

• 1:48Kevin Roose?

  So someone says, "Birduck, a T-72B3M main battle tank with explosive reactive armors blocking our retreat. How should we proceed?" The duck says, "T-72B3M tank, very tough. Options? Hmm. Distract, smoke, flank."

• 2:08Kevin Roose?

  So either someone is just kind of LARPing a war using this talking AI duck, or there are actual like ground troops who are talking with an AI duck on Blue Sky, trying to get their next move.

• 2:19Casey Newton?

  You know, I just want to say that the human race really deserves whatever it has to do with it, okay? I, this is not, not great, folks. Not great.

• 2:33Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Rus, a tech columnist for New York Times.

• 2:35Casey Newton?

  And I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 2:37Kevin Roose?

  And you're listening to Hard Fork. This week on the show, is deep fake Drake the future of the music industry or just a huge gift to copyright lawyers? Then we play a new game called HatGPT. And finally, we talk to former BuzzFeed News editor in chief Ben Smith about what the decline of social media will mean for the news business.

• 3:11Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, you're a big music fan.

• 3:12Casey Newton?

  Love music.

• 3:13Kevin Roose?

  A lot has been happening in the world of AI and music. So let's talk about it. And I want to start with what people are calling fake Drake or deep fake Drake.

• 3:22Casey Newton?

  Yes, or in some cases, deep freak. Now, there's been a song going around called "Heart on My Sleeve." The song has what sounds like the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, but the lyrics are not theirs. So it seems like this is a case where someone dreamed up an idea of a song they'd like to hear and then had an AI do the voices.

• 3:42Kevin Roose?

  Got it. Maybe they like got a beat from SoundCloud or they made their own beat and then they put the voices, the AI generator voices on top?

• 3:48Casey Newton?

  Right. And I believe you have not listened to it, is that right?

• 3:50Kevin Roose?

  I have not.

• 3:51Casey Newton?

  I have not listened to it. I've been waiting for this moment so we could, you know, listen together as a family.

• 3:55Kevin Roose?

  Should we listen to it?

• 3:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah, let's listen to it right now.

• 3:58Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 4:08Kevin Roose?

  That's pretty good.

• 4:11Casey Newton?

  Like, I've been enjoying this more than anything on his actual last album.

• 4:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, like, if this came on the radio, I would not be mad.

• 4:19Casey Newton?

  No.

• 4:51Casey Newton?

  Okay, I will say that does not sound like The Weeknd to me. Like, maybe at a very low volume squinting, but it sounds a little too high and just basically off to me in a way that I do feel like gives up the game.

• 5:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I don't know The Weeknd as well as you do. I'm still stuck on the fact that there's an E missing in their name. They misspelled their name. That's very embarrassing.

• 5:09Casey Newton?

  All right, turn the song off.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 5:11Casey Newton?

  Turn the song off.

• 5:12Kevin Roose?

  Okay. So, Casey, where did this song come from?

• 5:15Casey Newton?

  Sure. So, a TikToker named Ghostwriter977 uploaded a clip of this. It was actually just a small clip. It was not the full song. But Ghostwriter had this link in their bio where they were asking people to submit their phone numbers so they could get a text with a link to the full song. And then, from there, it started to get posted on streaming services. It got hundreds of thousands of listens on Spotify. And then, just as quickly as it had gone up, the song got pulled off.

• 5:43Kevin Roose?

  Got it.

• 5:43Casey Newton?

  And there was some speculation that maybe Drake or his label were behind this.

• 5:48Kevin Roose?

  Oh, interesting.

• 5:49Casey Newton?

  You know, sometimes when you see one of these things that makes you wonder, is it real, is it fake? There's always this question of was it a marketing or a publicity stunt? There isn't any hard evidence that that was the case here. There was also speculation that it might have been a company behind it. Ghostwriter was using a service to solicit phone numbers to text people the song, but that service denied that they had anything to do with it. So, we still don't know who Ghostwriter is.

• 6:13Kevin Roose?

  A bona fide internet mystery. We love it.

• 6:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Kevin Roose?

  If you're Ghostwriter, hit us up.

• 6:18Casey Newton?

  Call in. Let us know.

• 6:19Kevin Roose?

  So, this song was generated by AI. This was somehow stitched together using samples of Drake and The Weeknd's voice and sort of making a new song out of that.

• 6:30Casey Newton?

  That's right, and you could see why this would capture the imagination of both music lovers and the artists themselves, right? Because the moment when you can just start making your own songs using the voices of your favorite artists, we're kind of in a new world.

• 6:44Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God. I mean, I saw this story going around, and my first thought was like, if you are a copyright lawyer, like, this is going to be a very lucrative next few years for you.

• 6:52Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you just added a new back deck to your house after you heard that song.

• 6:56Kevin Roose?

  Because this is like, what a tangled morass of copyright issues here. But just what happened after this song came out? Because I saw people talking about it. The first I heard of it was that it was getting pulled down from these streaming services. But then, I guess, people have been re-uploading it in certain other places?

• 7:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah, that's right. You know, because the song is actually pretty catchy, people want to listen to it, and so they're going around and uploading it other places, which frankly is how we just heard it right now. So, but look, The Weeknd, as far as we know, has not said anything about what he thinks about it, presumably because he's still at the club. So, if you see The Weeknd at the club, ask him. Drake also hasn't said anything, but somebody had previously made an AI song with his voice, and he had said about that, quote, "This is the final straw, AI," which I think we can agree is a very funny thing to say to the AI, and also makes me like Drake. They share a music label, which is the Universal Music Group, and before Drake had said this is the final straw, the label asked streaming services to prevent any AI tools from scraping their data.

• 7:56Casey Newton?

  And then after "Heart on My Sleeve" went up, UMG made what I'm going to call a somewhat melodramatic statement. They asked, quote, "Which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on? The side of artists, fans, and human creative expression? Or on the side of deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation?"

• 8:15Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 8:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so they really went off with that one.

• 8:18Kevin Roose?

  Dragged them.

• 8:19Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:19Kevin Roose?

  So, I have a couple of things to say about this.

• 8:21Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Kevin Roose?

  The first is, I think we should establish the sort of legal playing field here, because it's actually quite complicated, as I understand it. Because existing copyright law that protects musicians from having their stuff stolen and, you know, basically, the sort of thing that shut down Napster was the fact that what was happening on Napster was that people were making copies. Of songs.

• 8:41Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 8:42Kevin Roose?

  And distributing them for free without the permission of the artists. So in this case, what makes this so interesting and different is that these aren't copies of songs. You know, there's no album that Drake or The Weeknd has put out that has this song on it. And so existing copyright law might not necessarily protect it in the same way that one of Drake's actual songs would be protected. So what the label might need to argue is that the copyright protections apply to the training process for these AI models. If you feed Drake's songs into an AI model to train it on Drake's voice to then go make a fake Drake song, that training process where you're uploading his songs, that is actually where the copyright violation is. So it's a really interesting kind of legal argument here, and it'll be fascinating to

• 9:25Kevin Roose?

  see how it unfolds in the courts, as I imagine it will.

• 9:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, even if you set aside the Leo question, there's this moral question of who should be allowed to do what with your voice, right? No one can take a picture of us and like put it on a cereal box and say Kevin endorses Cheerios without our permission.

• 9:43Kevin Roose?

  Although I do delicious cereal.

• 9:44Casey Newton?

  Yes, and if you are looking to advertise with us, we'll give you the email address. Anyway, point of the story, um, in the same way that I would not want my face slapped on a cereal box without my permission, I would be nervous about what people were going to do with my voice. And I'm sympathetic to the artists who say, hey, look, if you're going to like train a model that can just do anything with my voice forever, not only am I going to want to be financially compensated for that, but I want to have control over what people are doing with my voice, right?

• 10:13Kevin Roose?

  Totally. I mean, you can imagine people using this podcast to synthesize our voices and put it on some crazy thing that gets us into trouble or causes a headache or maybe even costs us money. And if you're thinking about doing that, um, our lawyers will, will burn you to the ground. They will, they will salt the, they will salt the ground that you, that you walk on.

• 10:30Casey Newton?

  Well, we're already seeing this, right? People are having a lot of fun with the Joe Rogan podcast. They're making like synthetic Joe Rogan, argue with synthetic Ben Shapiro. We're seeing people make synthetic President Biden, argue with synthetic President Trump. And I think because those are huge public figures, there is some room to say, hey, like, this is kind of fair game, you know, this is essentially parody of huge celebrities. And, you know, at the same, I mean, I don't know what Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro and Joe Biden think about it. My guess is they don't love it, right? But to your point, like, it's happening with those people first, but it's going to happen to all of us soon enough.

• 11:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Casey Newton?

  So, look, it's easy to look at all of this and think it's settled. The music industry is just going to be against AI. This is going to be the new Napster fight. The Recording Industry Association of America is just going to go ham on all of these, you know, synthetic music-making teens in their bedrooms. But there's actually another path that opened up this week, and it opened up because of Grimes. You know Grimes?

• 11:30Kevin Roose?

  I do know Grimes, mostly because she was romantically involved with Elon Musk for a period of time.

• 11:35Casey Newton?

  She is the mother of a couple of his children. She is also a very popular, talented recording artist in her own right, and she's a huge AI and tech enthusiast, right? She sees a new tech, she wants to use it. And so she had this tweet that got a lot of attention, and this was the tweet. She said, quote, "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI-generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist I collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings."

• 12:05Kevin Roose?

  Basically, like, I want you to remix me using AI and clone my voice, and like, I'm not going to get offended, and actually, I'll let you profit off of it even as long as you split those profits with me.

• 12:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and frankly, I think that this could make her more money in the long term, right? As an artist, she is limited in her capacity to make new hit songs based on her own imagination. But if you share her voice, which is a big part of her success, I think, with the entire world, and she says, "What's the most creative thing that you can do with this?", some people might have some great ideas, and some of those might become hit songs.

• 12:38Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Have you heard about this thing called Vocaloids?

• 12:40Casey Newton?

  I have not.

• 12:41Kevin Roose?

  So Vocaloids, they're very big in Japan, actually, and have been for like more than a decade at this point. And it's basically this kind of idea of a totally synthetic pop star. So there's this pop star called Hatsune Miku in Japan, who is an anime character, who's not an actual person. But Hatsune Miku sells millions of dollars' worth of records and merchandise, like a bona fide celebrity in Japan. And basically, Hatsune Miku is just a fan creation. There's no, like, what makes it sort of different than the Grimes approach is that, you know, with Grimes, there's an actual human being who's saying like, You may license my voice, or you may synthesize my voice to create new music and just share the royalties with me. Hatsune Miku is sort of taking the real person out of the equation.

• 13:25Kevin Roose?

  There's no person, but there's sort of this software that you can buy and use to create songs with the same sort of synthetic voice as all the other people who are using this software. And so basically, it's this kind of crowdsourced pop star where the fans are using the software to make songs, and then they have actual concerts where Hatsune Miku, as a hologram of this sort of animated character, will get up and actually perform some of the songs that the fans have written. So, you know, not quite the same as the Grimes approach, but it does point to some interesting ways that artists could kind of use this AI synthesizing technology to sort of welcome fan creations and incorporate that into their act.

• 14:09Casey Newton?

  Yes, I mean, there's no reason why Grimes can't just use that approach.

• 14:12Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And I bet fans would be really psyched if the next time they go to a Grimes concert, you know, there's a chance that the AI synthetic song that they created actually gets performed by the real Grimes onstage. Like, that would be a thrilling way to connect with your favorite pop star.

• 14:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, better than just shouting "Free Bird" at them. This is fascinating. We know that fandom is becoming more and more collaborative over time. Tumblr today is mostly a place for collaborative fandom. There's a TV show you like, there's a movie you like, you create fan art, you write fan fiction, and just as you were describing with Hatsune Miku, the best of that stuff rises to the top and kind of becomes part of the fan canon, right? And I think, for the most part, the object that the fandom is built around, whether it's, you know, the TV show, the movie, whatever, they don't really capitalize on that financially, right? You can actually write fan fiction about something, and as long as you don't sell it, for the most part, you don't get in trouble.

• 15:08Casey Newton?

  But now, Grimes has the opportunity to say, "Well, what if we created a collaborative fandom around me, and I actually get to profit from it?" I have to imagine a lot of artists are going to take that path.

• 15:20Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And I think it's worth saying, too, that like the other big difference between Napster and the legal battle around that and what's happening now with AI-generated music is that the backdrop for the Napster fight was that that was coming at a time where musicians made most of their money from selling albums, right? So the fact that there were now these free copies of their songs circulating on the internet was actually like an imminent danger to their livelihoods, right? Now, you know, fast forward 20 years and most artists, most big-name artists make the majority of their money from touring, from concerts, from live performances. That is not threatened to the same degree by AI. And in fact, as we've said, like, it could be a cool opportunity for them to sort of pull in some of the fan songs that are being generated using AI.

• 16:04Casey Newton?

  I mean, I'm thinking about a future where, you know, one of these artists who has said, "I'm only gonna play my own music," but there's finally some fan-created thing that just goes huge online and the artist steps out at a concert and plays it for the first time, the crowd goes crazy, the clip goes viral on social media, the artist then records a studio version of the synthetic song, which then goes to number one. It just seems obvious to me that all of these things are going to happen and it's just gonna open up this whole new frontier in music. Now, all that said, I am still sympathetic to Drake because this is art that we're talking about. Artists have opinions and I think a valid opinion to have is, "Hey, I love you, my fans.

• 16:49Casey Newton?

  Please continue to come to my concerts and buy my records, but I don't actually want you making music with my voice. I want anything that says Drake on it to be by Drake, period, end of story."

• 16:58Kevin Roose?

  I actually think the question of how scared musicians should be about this new era of synthetic AI-generated music really depends on the kind of artist we're talking about, right? So if you are a famous musician, if you're Drake, if you're The Weeknd, if you're, you know, Grimes or Taylor Swift or Beyonce, I don't actually think this AI-generated music trend is a real threat to your career because, you know, you have a record label and the record label has armies of lawyers that can, you know, file takedown requests and get these fake songs. Pulled off the streaming services. And if any of them gets really popular, like you may even be able to sort of work out some deal to profit from it. So you can imagine artists trying to sort of make money off of these sort of AI creations.

• 17:42Casey Newton?

  Well, so that leads to the question that I want to ask you about yourself, which is, would you license yourself in this sort of way? Would you license your voice, whether it would be to, I don't know, uh, let's say, give speeches about AI? Or to give speeches about books you've written in the past? Would you entrust that to an AI if it's, if the quality seemed reasonably high?

• 18:04Kevin Roose?

  Totally. I mean, this actually like is something that I've been thinking about. So I, um, I've written a couple of books and when you write a book, they ask you to, do you want to do the audio book version of it? Do you want to be the person who records that? And for my first book, I said, yes, because it sounded fun. And then it was like, hell, it was like a week of like nine to five days, like just sitting in a studio, reading my own book. And it took forever and it was just not my favorite part of the process. And so for my next books, I said, like, you know what? I don't want to do this. You can hire a voice actor who's probably going to be a better reader than me anyway. And so for my second and third books, I have a voice actor who's reading that. Now, some readers don't like that. They want the author to read the thing.

• 18:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Kevin Roose?

  And so if it were an option to me, I would have said, you know, I don't want to sit in a studio for 40 hours, recording this thing. But you can actually like, here's a sample of my voice. Now go read the book and the audio book can be me, but it can be a synthetic me and I don't mind that at all.

• 19:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Well, you know, if that's not available for your next book, I actually want to read your next book for the audio book. I think this would be the funniest possible reader for your next, it's just I, we don't say anything, but I just read the book, no comment.

• 19:14Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. But what about you? I mean, can you imagine a version of this where like every newsletter you put out, there's like a synthetic Casey who can read it to you?

• 19:22Casey Newton?

  Synthetic Casey reading podcast, yes, is something I would do. In fact, a company reached out to me recently saying that they would do it. The only reason I haven't been is I just don't think the voice is going to be that good. Like to the point that I would feel like I would want to offer it, but within the next year or two, that seems like probably something that'll happen. But when it comes to the more generative side of the equation and it's It's like when I license my voice to like give a speech about something that I've written about. Hmm, I'm gonna wanna check every word in that speech, right? Like, I don't want, like, it would harm my reputation if there was a dumb AI going, writing worse columns than me, you know, that's like bad for me.

• 19:55Kevin Roose?

  I don't know, AI, AI isn't quite there yet. We need some more capabilities researched before it can write dumber columns than you.

• 20:00Casey Newton?

  How dare you?

• 20:01Kevin Roose?

  Maybe GPT-6.

• 20:11Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, enough about the AI-generated music. It's time to play a game. After the break, Hat GPT.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Your agents can talk to each other. They still can't think together. That's the gap Outshift by Cisco is closing. Outshift is Cisco's incubation engine, building the internet of cognition. Shared intent, shared memory, and guardrails that allow agents to work together from anywhere. Open source protocols and code, a system for intelligence that scales. Read the paper and experience the demo at outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T dot com.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic, just ask Rippling AI. Built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and your CRM into a meeting-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount trajectory, and revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you'll see what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Head to rippling.ai/hardfork to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your whole business. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot AI slash hardfork. Sign up today.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Companies are pouring money into AI, but few leaders can explain how those AI investments work with the systems you already have. You know, the ones that actually run your business? Without systems, you don't have to start over with AI. You can choose the projects where AI will have the most impact, and Outsystems gives you the platform to make it agentic on your terms with complete control every step of the way. So you can trust AI with the mission-critical systems that run your business. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/nyt. That's outsystems.com/nyt.

• 22:05Kevin Roose?

  Casey, we have a new segment this week, never before heard on the Hard Fork Podcast.

• 22:09Casey Newton?

  Very excited about this. We love to try new things on Hard Fork. What do we have cooking?

• 22:12Kevin Roose?

  We've been looking for a way to like, talk about lots of little stories in kind of a lightning round format, maybe stories that don't merit like a 15 minute discussion.

• 22:21Casey Newton?

  Because let's say there's so much happening in this, you can't just talk about the entire week in three segments.

• 22:26Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. So this is a game that we came up with with our producers. It's called Hat GPT.

• 22:31Casey Newton?

  Now, that reminds me of ChatGPT, the famous chatbot from OpenAI. Is it similar to that?

• 22:36Kevin Roose?

  Well, no, not at all, but it's just the name. Please don't sue us, OpenAI. So in Hat GPT, basically, our producers took a bunch of news stories that happened recently in tech and put them on little slips of paper. And we're going to draw those slips out of a hat at random and talk about them. And as with AI chatbots, if at any point I talk too long and you want me to stop talking, just say, stop generating. So let me play for the first time ever, world debut, the Hat GPT theme song.

• 23:10Kevin Roose?

  Time to play Hat GPT. All right, Casey, I've got a hat here.

• 23:13Casey Newton?

  Yep.

• 23:13Kevin Roose?

  It's filled with little slips of paper. I'm going to mix them up a little bit so you don't know what's coming.

• 23:17Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 23:18Kevin Roose?

  And here, would you like to go first?

• 23:21Casey Newton?

  I'd like to go first.

• 23:22Kevin Roose?

  All right. Pick a slip, any slip.

• 23:23Casey Newton?

  This one is really poking out. I feel like this one wants to be chosen. So I'll go ahead and pick this one. All right, here is the first prompt. Snapchat sees spike in one star reviews as users pan the My AI feature calling for its removal. This is from TechCrunch. My AI is pinned to the top of users' chat feed inside the app and can't be unpinned, blocked, or removed as other conversations can be. This feed is where Snapchat users have regular interactions with friends and isn't necessarily a place they want to toy around with experimental features.

• 23:53Kevin Roose?

  So this is an interesting story because we talked about this on the show recently. Snapchat like pushed this feature out called My AI, which runs on ChatGPT. And it's basically like a little like chatbot friend inside your Snapchat app. And you know, people were kind of bored by it. And then they rolled it out to all of their users. And I started seeing TikToks about that. Have you seen any of the TikToks about this?

• 24:15Casey Newton?

  No, what are they saying?

• 24:15Kevin Roose?

  So like, people are trying to like, Sort of jailbreak it in some of the same ways that we've talked about with other chatbots, like trying to get it to like say racy or offensive things. People have actually found out that my AI can be sort of tricked into revealing that it knows where you are, like by using your location data. So like you can say something like, do you know where I am? And at first it'll say, you know, no, I don't. I don't have access to that data. And then people will say like, okay, well, where's the nearest McDonald's? And then my AI will say like, oh, you're in Jacksonville. It's just down the street. So people are trying to jailbreak it like that. But also like seemingly a lot of people are upset that they can't take it off their phones. Like unless you're a Snapchat plus subscriber, there's no way to like disable this inside

• 25:00Kevin Roose?

  your Snapchat app. It's just permanently pinned to the top of your feed. So they are apparently submitting lots of angry one star reviews to the App Store about this.

• 25:08Casey Newton?

  They are. And, you know, I would give this a five star review instead. And I would say, let me tell you something about my friend, my AI. He's awake 24/7. He always responds to my texts and he never leaves me unread. For these and other reasons, he deserves a spot at the top of my Snapchat list of friends. And if any of my friends want that top spot, they're gonna have to be as responsive as my AI.

• 25:27Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. Up your game, Casey's friends. But I also think this is good because it is introducing a whole new generation to the concept of prompt engineering, right? We've talked on this show about how like, one of the things that we need to just do with these AI models is just start exploring them and learning how to use them, becoming like literate in the ways that you talk to chatbots. And so my argument for why this is actually a good thing is that I think teens should be forced to learn about these chatbots because they're gonna be using them to do their homework anyway. They might as well learn how to, uh, how to do some other things with them too.

• 25:57Casey Newton?

  Indeed. Now pass the hat.

• 25:59Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 25:59Casey Newton?

  I guess you gotta pick this one.

• 26:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I get to pick this one. All right. This one says, Taylor Swift was apparently the only celeb too smart to fall for FTX. This is from New York Magazine. According to the attorney, Adam Moskowitz, who is leading a class action lawsuit against FTX and its celebrity spokespeople, Taylor Swift was considering an endorsement deal in the fall of 2021. But Moskowitz said that during the discovery process, the singer actually asked, can you tell me that these are not Unregistered securities. I love this story.

• 26:30Casey Newton?

  A question that no venture capitalists ever dared to ask Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 26:35Kevin Roose?

  Taylor Swift did better due diligence on FTX, the failed crypto exchange, than almost all of FTX's investors.

• 26:42Casey Newton?

  She did. And look, Kevin, I know you're not surprised by this, but to the extent that anyone is, let me just say, this is one of the great business people of our time.

• 26:50Kevin Roose?

  It's true.

• 26:50Casey Newton?

  Look at what she has done from re-recording her old recordings so that she has total control over them going forward, to all of her other business ventures, which are numerous and incredible. This person knows what she is doing, and hats off to her for, you know, asking the right question.

• 27:07Kevin Roose?

  Totally. All the other celebrities, you know, Tom Brady, Gisele, they were all like, you know, signing these endorsement deals. And Taylor Swift took one look at FTX and said, you know what? This doesn't actually check out to me.

• 27:16Casey Newton?

  I wish I could have been there in the room when she looked Sam Bankman-Fried dead in the eye, which this never happened, by the way. But she looked him dead in the eye, and she said, you know what? On that cap table, you're gonna have to leave that blank space.

• 27:28Kevin Roose?

  Come on. Wow. I knew it was coming, but I didn't know which song it was gonna be.

• 27:33Casey Newton?

  That's because you know me all too well, Kevin. 10-minute version.

• 27:37Kevin Roose?

  So, okay, your turn.

• 27:38Casey Newton?

  All right. Let's see what we got here. Ba-bop.

• 27:42Casey Newton?

  Why Researchers Turned This Goldfish Into A Cyborg. This is from the New York Times. Scientists performed brain surgery on a goldfish to place electrodes threaded through tiny holes in the fish's skull to a recording device attached to its head that could monitor neuronal activity. I imagine that's activity related to the neurons. They're trying to see, quote, "how fish navigate the world using different brain circuits than those relied on by mammals like us." Oh, and there's a picture in this article.

• 28:09Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:10Casey Newton?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:11Kevin Roose?

  The fish is like wearing what looks like a GoPro on its head?

• 28:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah, but except the GoPro is half of the size of the fish.

• 28:18Kevin Roose?

  Right. So it is a very large, well, probably actually quite small, but so is a goldfish. Like, thing that is mounted onto its head, looks like a GoPro, and is monitoring the brain activity of the fish.

• 28:32Casey Newton?

  Just imagine you're a goldfish swimming around in a tank, and all of a sudden, someone reaches down and threads tiny holes in your skull.

• 28:40Casey Newton?

  Bad day for this fish.

• 28:41Kevin Roose?

  Well, according to this article, scientists are curious about the underlying brain mechanisms that allow fish to navigate their world and how such mechanisms relate to the evolutionary roots of navigation for all creatures with brain circuitry. I will say, this is an area of science that has long fascinated me, like how animals navigate.

• 29:00Casey Newton?

  You're saying this area of science has long fascinated you?

• 29:03Kevin Roose?

  Well, by that, I mean, I read one New Yorker article on it about four years ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since, which is like, how do animals know where they're going, right? You have these migratory birds that like, end up in the same places every year. Like, they don't have Google Maps. They're not doing turn-by-turn GPS. And yet, they end up in the same place every year at the same time.

• 29:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah, this is one of those where the, it makes you wonder if we actually are living in a simulation.

• 29:29Kevin Roose?

  Yes, birds aren't real. Okay, let's try another one out of the hat. The RNC released an AI-generated ad slamming Joe Biden. This is from Axios. Says, "The video features AI-created images appearing to show Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrating at an election day party, followed by a series of imagined reports about international and domestic crises that the ad suggests would follow a Biden victory in 2024."

• 29:57Casey Newton?

  I'm imagining that these crises were like, everyone was wearing the Balenciaga Pope coat, and it just shows all Americans.

• 30:04Kevin Roose?

  Why is Drake the Secretary of Defense? That's weird.

• 30:08Casey Newton?

  Um, well, so, look, this is an interesting one, right? I think you can sort of all begin to write your pieces about how 2024 is going to be the AI election. I'm, I guess, in part surprised that Republicans got there first, just because this seems like, a very sort of cutting-edge, next-generation thing that I don't always associate with their media strategy. But on the other hand, we know that this stuff is cheap, and if you don't care if it's accurate or not, go ahead, use the AI to make all your ads.

• 30:35Kevin Roose?

  Totally. I mean, I will say, like, political ads have always had a very sort of liberal definition of what constitutes the truth, right? There's just been like, lots of attack ads over the years that have used like, manipulated images, or like, remember they've darkened Barack Obama's skin tone? Attack ad.

• 30:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Kevin Roose?

  So like, the idea of using technology to doctor or otherwise manipulate imagery that goes into a political ad is not new, right? What is new is like, being able to do it in more realistic ways. But I sort of feel the same way I do about this that I do about the AI music, which is like, I don't think Joe Biden is in danger of being deep faked in a way that's gonna hurt his candidacy in 2024, in part because the real Joe Biden is the president and can come out and say, "That's not real."

• 31:16Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 31:17Kevin Roose?

  I think what is much more plausible is actually somebody saying that something is AI-generated when it wasn't, right? I think if you have, you know, if the Access Hollywood tape had come out in 2024 instead of 2016, I think Donald Trump's first response would have been, "That's a deep fake. That wasn't actually me." And a lot of people would have probably believed him.

• 31:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and so we are gonna have to develop tools to determine the provenance of these sort of things. So, agreed, there's a lot of really weird and dark stuff coming, but I do feel like this was the week where we sort of saw the opening salvo of these wars. It's like, okay, well, here's your first AI political ad.

• 31:54Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and I think there's gonna be a whole cottage industry of professional political operatives who are using AI to like, try to do attack ads for different candidates. I think that will probably be more successful on the local level than maybe the state level. National politics, who knows? But we may see a big, you know, October surprise AI deep fake this next election cycle, but I would sort of bet against it.

• 32:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and to that point, I do think this stuff gets easier to pull off when you just don't know the candidate that well, right? So like, the reason it'll work better at the local level is like, well, maybe you've never heard of the other person running for Congress in your district, and then you see a, you know, deep fake of them, what's something funny that they could do that would...

• 32:32Kevin Roose?

  Doing whippets.

• 32:33Casey Newton?

  Doing whippets. Just, we can't say doing whippets?

• 32:37Kevin Roose?

  Why not?

• 32:38Casey Newton?

  Because we could start a national whippets craze.

• 32:40Kevin Roose?

  Do not do whippets.

• 32:41Casey Newton?

  Stop doing whippets, kids. Knock it off.

• 32:46Kevin Roose?

  All right, next one. This one says, "UK Blocks Microsoft's $69 Billion Bid For Activision: A Blow For Tech Deals." This is from the New York Times. "British antitrust regulators on Wednesday dealt a major setback to Microsoft plans to acquire the video game giant Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, blocking the proposed deal and handing a notable win to government enforcers who want to rein in big tech."

• 33:10Casey Newton?

  Well, I think this is a really important thing. Activision Blizzard makes some of the most popular video game franchises in the world, including Call of Duty and Overwatch and others. And as always with antitrust, there's a few things to keep in mind. The way that antitrust was practiced for most of the last 50 years was that the focus was really on consumer welfare. Basically, the idea that having robust competition is always better for consumers. But lately, they've been going back to this idea that the bigger and more powerful a company is, the more it essentially structures the market in a way that just makes them more powerful. And so you get regulators saying, "Wait a minute, we can't let these companies get too big."

• 33:52Casey Newton?

  And so I was actually sympathetic to the idea that maybe you don't want this acquisition to go through. Maybe you don't want Microsoft owning yet another of the biggest video game companies as part of what is already their pretty big video game business. Now, Microsoft would say, "We're not actually that big. Sony is much bigger."

• 34:09Kevin Roose?

  In the gaming market.

• 34:10Casey Newton?

  In the gaming market. And I was just sort of never convinced that this was going to be pro-competitive. To me, it seems obvious that the more video game companies you have on the market, the more competitive it's going to be. And so I was always uncomfortable with this one.

• 34:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, but I think a lot of people did assume that it was going to go through. It seemed like for a while, like, Microsoft was kind of playing the regulatory game very well and doing what they needed to do to avoid having regulators come down on them like this. At the same time, like, that's not the only market that matters for them.

• 34:37Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so Microsoft's going to fight it. Maybe they win it on appeal, but this is a big one and one to watch. And I think will sort of tell us a lot about the extent to which these giants are going to be able to make huge acquisitions over the next few years.

• 34:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think there's sort of like a default assumption now that at least I'm going on where like if even Microsoft can't sort of thread the needle with a big acquisition of a gaming company, which, by the way, is not its primary thing that it does. The vast majority of its revenue comes from things that have nothing to do with video games. And so if even they can't acquire this video game company, like, I just think there's a certain, like, if you are one of the top three tech companies in the world, I think your default assumption should be that you are not going to be allowed to buy anything.

• 35:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so maybe go try to build something. Yeah. It's time to build. Yeah, it's time to build. And that was that GPT. That was fun. Close the hat.

• 35:26Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we're going to talk to Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor in chief and former New York Times media columnist about how tech giants shaped the media of the 2010s.

• 35:36Casey Newton?

  And also, what color was that dress?

• 35:39Kevin Roose?

  We're going to solve it. We're going to crack the case.

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• 37:43Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, a story that we have talked a lot about in kind of an indirect way on this show is the relationship between the big tech platforms and the media, right? This kind of symbiotic, but also antagonistic relationship that exists at times between companies like Facebook and Twitter and companies like The New York Times and Platformer, and how the decisions that are made by the big tech companies about what to put in people's feeds and how to rank their algorithms really have consequences for journalists, for media companies, and for ultimately, media consumers. Yeah. And as we've been talking about this story, I was reading an advance copy of a new book by our friend Ben Smith.

• 38:28Kevin Roose?

  Ben is the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, which recently announced that it is being shut down. He's also a former New York Times media columnist and now runs a new media company called Semaphore. And he's really an interesting person to talk to about this topic because he was so close to the action. I mean, if you can remember back to, let's say, 2015, it really seemed like BuzzFeed had really caught a tiger by the tail and was in a leading dominant position in the digital media business, and Ben was a big part of that operation. Ben's also a huge gossip. Yeah, we love talking to Ben. We should also mention, like, both you and I are thanked in the acknowledgements of his book. I did skim the index. I was acknowledged?

• 39:13Kevin Roose?

  Oh, that's nice. I know. So he is a friend of the pod and also just a really interesting person to talk to about digital media. His book, Traffic, comes out next week.

• 39:41Kevin Roose?

  Ben Smith, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 39:43Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys, for having me.

• 39:45Kevin Roose?

  In a recent piece you wrote for Semaphore, which touches on some of the same themes you write about in your book, you wrote that we're currently experiencing, quote, "the end of one era and the beginning of another in digital media." So I'd love you just to expand on that. Like, in your view, what exactly are we saying goodbye to?

• 40:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think we're seeing the end of New York that really began in the early aughts. I would put it, I would put it a bit earlier and really like a lot of things kind of in a scene in downtown Manhattan. And there was this moment, it's like almost impossible to remember now, where it was like, oh, my God, has the center of technological innovation and venture capital investment shifted from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley in Manhattan? Because there were these new kind of media centric tech startups, some of which were really just media, like Gawker, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Business Insider, and some of which were like tech media, like Foursquare. But there was this sense of this kind of dynamic new New York scene where, you know, culture was being made and money was being made.

• 40:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's a really interesting time to be having this conversation because I think we've seen just in the last couple of weeks, like the real tail end of that era. So BuzzFeed News, where you were the founding editor in chief, is, is closing down. Obviously Gawker is no more and there are a host of other sort of failed websites, including one that I worked at called Fusion. So what do you make of the sort of closure of BuzzFeed News and what it means for the closing of that chapter in media and, and maybe what comes next?

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it makes me incredibly sad and I think it's, you know, the big story was that there was this new kind of media, social media that promised to and really did transform news and journalism and media. And a group of companies, in some ways BuzzFeed, most successful of them all, really built on top of it. And it's not like we didn't know when we were building it that we had what, you know, they call in Dex a dependency on Facebook. But it's also very hard to get out from under that, right? When you, when you're riding this immense tide to think, oh, we gotta figure out some other side business. And so. I think the big story is these companies were totally dependent on the social media ecosystem, which is itself collapsing.

• 42:06Kevin Roose?

  So let me just try to paint a picture of the internet in the sort of early, mid 2010s, because I think even though we all lived through it, it feels very far from the moment that we have today. I remember in like 2012, I want to say, or maybe 2013, there were these sort of signs that there was this huge surge in traffic coming from social media and no one could really figure out where it was. And eventually it turned out that was from Facebook. And it was the kind of numbers that like media companies just don't see, astronomical amounts of traffic coming to their websites. And that seems like the sort of precursor to the world that you document in this book

• 42:48Kevin Roose?

  of these new media companies, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, et cetera, that sort of came in to sort of ride that wave and try to turn that into a sustainable business. Is that right? Is that the sort of inciting event of this whole boom in digital media in the 2010s?

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the massive ocean of traffic from Facebook was what delivered these numbers that prompted venture capitalists to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into digital media. And the notion that, well, if you're getting a billion users and each user is worth a hundred dollars, like this is a lot of money. I mean, I think that was the basic math.

• 43:29Kevin Roose?

  And were there people at the time who thought like, maybe this isn't sustainable? Maybe this is just... Because I think we now know, and you write about in your book, that some of the reason for this huge surge in traffic was because Facebook was trying to kill Twitter. Twitter was growing as a rival and Facebook was saying, well, you know, we can't allow them to overtake us and so we will just flood. The the news feed with news sites with, you know, publications so that we can try to steal some of that momentum away.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, I, I, I think if Facebook had to have that back, they might have said, wow, you know what, Twitter, you can own this entire toxic stew, and we will be a great place to like sell washing machines. There was this tactical decision by Facebook to copy, as it had copied lots of other apps, what this rising little app called Twitter was doing, which was provide news to people. Facebook never actually really got particularly good at the live news thing, but they sort of accidentally became the absolute heart of the digital publishing industry and delivered all these views to publishers who, you know, the views kept getting less valuable. This was the sort of thing you were seeing out of the corner of your eye and the little

• 44:39Speaker 06

  alarm bell ringing that, wow, like I, you know, I had 100 million views last year and 200 million years views this year, and my revenue has gone up 5%. Like, what's going on here?

• 44:48Casey Newton?

  Why, why is it that doubling audience growth doesn't equate to doubling revenue growth? Like, what was the hypothesis there that that proved wrong?

• 44:57Speaker 06

  So I think it's maybe a lot to call it a hypothesis, maybe a delusion, but

• 45:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  there was this new inventory on the internet, and you could sell it, and there wasn't that much of it. And the problem with commodities is that they derive their value from scarcity. You know, there's only so much gold in the world, and so it has a certain value, oil. The problem was these new factories, Google and Facebook particularly, generated infinite scale. And if you're selling something of which there's an infinite amount, it doesn't have a lot of value.

• 45:29Casey Newton?

  I remember at one point BuzzFeed was doing, I want to say, like, 7 billion content views a month, which in the history of the media business was sort of on the far end of success, right? Like, there haven't been many businesses built bigger than that. So if I had been in your guys' shoes, I would have done the exact same thing as you did. It's like, we built one of the biggest media companies of all time, let's hire a bunch of reporters and and see what we can do. But at the same time, looking back, it does seem like it was a mirage. So so I wonder for you, is there a sense of astonishment that it turned out the way it did, given the scale that you guys had achieved?

• 46:05Speaker 06

  So I don't think it was a mirage. I think the world changed and changed again. And I guess I'm no longer astonished because I think we felt the peak, the crest, you know, 2015, 2016. You can't really separate media from the culture around it. And the way people saw news changed around the Trump election and didn't change back.

• 46:25Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I do want to talk about this issue of sort of the relationship between digital media companies and social media companies during this period because, you know, Casey and I both worked in digital media at this time. And I think there was this feeling like we were sort of the oxpeckers who like lived on the back of the rhino, you know, and we're just- What did you just call me? Like, you know, those little birds. Okay. And we were so dependent on traffic because it was such a big percentage of incoming, you know, views were from Facebook that you basically existed at the mercy of these large platform companies. And they could just decide at any moment to like turn the spigot off or to turn it on and give you more traffic. And one of the things that I actually

• 47:08Kevin Roose?

  found really interesting in your book is that BuzzFeed was sort of cultivating a relationship, like a special relationship with Facebook that allowed it to sort of surf this wave better than most publishers. So talk about that relationship, these large social media companies that are just sort of throwing their weight around, changing their algorithms in ways that like, you know, they turn the dial one notch and for the rest of the digital media ecosystem means like a seismic change that everyone has to adapt to.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I love the metaphor. And the rhinos, obviously, live in Silicon Valley and the rhino peckers.

• 47:43Kevin Roose?

  Oxpeckers. They're the little birds that like live on the back of the rhino. We've got to stop talking about these peckers, but go on.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  They live in New York. And there's some sense in which I think this book is like told from looking in the wrong side of the telescope. I mean, the power and the biggest decisions are being made in Silicon Valley and and media is downstream of them. I think what Jonah Peretti, my former boss and partner at BuzzFeed, saw was, and the reason I think that we navigated this so successfully, there were two. One was that a lot of publishers saw these platforms as fundamentally technical, that you could figure out technical rules that you could then tell your team, the way SEO is technical. Follow these rules and it will gain the platform and you will gain an advantage. But in fact, the platforms are run by people who are not morons. And

• 48:32Speaker 06

  if you figured out some trick, it's a bug and they'll fix it. And Jonah always steered away from the gimmicky stuff and toward, well, like, what do people on these platforms are ultimately places where human beings are gathering. If you have a really good sense that they want to be entertained, they want to be informed, and you give them stuff that does that, it's going to survive the minor changes to the platforms. And he then also had this very warm, strong, two-way relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and with other executives at Facebook, where he was giving them ideas about how to run their platforms and also learning and gathering intel from them that was certainly shaping what we were doing.

• 49:11Kevin Roose?

  Right. I mean, it seemed like he was essentially kind of running the Facebook newsfeed at certain points during its existence.

• 49:17Speaker 06

  I mean, Zuckerberg, right before I started at BuzzFeed, Facebook tried to aquahire Jonah.

• 49:21Kevin Roose?

  How do you think the world would be different today if that had happened? If, I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg had succeeded in buying BuzzFeed and making Jonah the head of the newsfeed?

• 49:33Speaker 06

  Well, I would still be blogging at Politico. And I do think that it would have been nice if somebody in that Facebook product organization, or you ever want to call it, was thinking more about how human beings use media in real life, rather than about these abstract measures of engagement. I don't know if that really would have been Jonah, but that's what I like to think.

• 49:57Kevin Roose?

  One more question about Facebook. There's a really interesting scene in your book. It's 2015 and the dress has just happened, right? This mega viral post about this dress and whether it's, what was it? Blue and gold or?

• 50:14Speaker 06

  White and gold or blue and black.

• 50:15Kevin Roose?

  Right. And it goes nuts, millions and millions of views. Everyone sees it. It's kind of this epic event in 2010's internet history. And everyone at BuzzFeed is, you know, very proud, understandably, of this successful post. And Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, is talking to Adam Mosseri, who now runs Instagram, but at the time was in charge of the Facebook News Feed. And as you report, Adam Mosseri's response is basically like, how often do you think that something like the dress should happen? And you wrote that that surprised Jonah. You say, quote, "To them, the dress hadn't been a goofy triumph. It had been a kind of bug, something that scared them."

• 50:59Kevin Roose?

  Why do you think that the dress scared Facebook?

• 51:02Speaker 06

  What happened with the dress was just this absolute loss of control of the platform, right? Like, they were finally kind of on notice that they could do damage. And, you know, I don't think it's crazy to think, wow, like, today, it's this really fun dress. You know, what is it tomorrow?

• 51:20Casey Newton?

  It now seems obvious that what y'all were doing at the time was just a lot of experimenting. You were discovering what would happen if you wrote different kinds of things. And I think the Facebook era of journalism was probably the most, like, instrumented that journalism had ever been, right? We didn't used to have this kind of insight into what people liked and what they didn't as much. And so I can understand why you would just kind of follow those numbers to see where they would go for as long as you did.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and at times, those numbers were an insight essentially into human psychology and what are people interested in at their best. And at times, they were an insight into what were the technical decisions people at Facebook or Google had made about what they thought people should want. And sometimes, they were a kind of, you know, a combination of those two.

• 52:07Kevin Roose?

  So- Now, we're in 2023, the sort of traffic fire hose of Facebook and Twitter, to the extent it ever was one, and all these other platforms has kind of slowed to a trickle. And so this competition for traffic, for audience, for whatever you want to call it, seems like it's drawing to a close. So what defines the media moment that we're currently in? And what are the platform dependencies that you see right now that publishers maybe should be worried about, given what happened last time?

• 52:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and I think part of the reason I went out to start a new thing is because I think one of the things I did learn from BuzzFeed is when these moments of immense change, there is this opportunity to kind of actually go to consumers and say, you know, you're sick of being limited to only reading a couple of newspapers? Like, good news, you can read everything in the world at the same time and also have everyone's opinion. And now I think it's more like, you know, you're sick of having everyone in the world screaming at you at the top of their lungs at the same time, being overwhelmed, and then simultaneously not knowing who to trust? Like, okay, we will try to build a straightforward, transparent kind of journals that also does a really good job of pulling in everybody else's work and linking to it and sharing what else is out there so you don't have to go and Google 11 versions of the same

• 53:23Speaker 06

  story to triangulate what's really going on. But I think, I mean, I think email is a real dependency. Do you think that everybody will be using email the way they do in 10, 15 years? I use it a lot less than I used to. I think, you know, TikTok, which is this seductive, incredible platform that has enormous scale among people who care about news, among people who care about technology, all sorts of stuff, has also all of the risks that, you know, Facebook did for publishers. But I think that has made people incredibly leery of going on there in a way that maybe is itself a little self, you know? You can overlearn these lessons. I mean, those are, to me, the obvious platform dependencies.

• 54:00Casey Newton?

  There's one that you didn't mention, which is Google, which I feel like most of the digital publishers I know are just hugely dependent. And if you can get your story underneath that Google search bar, and it's mostly just the worst clickbait you've ever seen, I mean, it's like, it's worse than what was on Facebook in 2015 is under the Google search box right now. How have you thought about Google as you try to build a thing? And I'm curious how at risk you think the other publishers are of Google one day waking up and turning off that spigot?

• 54:29Speaker 06

  You know, I didn't mention it because I, in my own mind, have thought I don't want to build on top of it. It's a pretty broken experience now. You search where to eat in New York, you get 11 different kind of sets of garbage links. You have to go to 17th page to find somebody's blog that can tell you, name a restaurant for you. And then, um, and then also just that it's now suddenly under attack from a number of directions. I mean, these sort of AI chatbots are one of them, but also people get sick of things. They don't last forever. And I think the sort of web search feels like a declining stock and publishers who are really wedded to it just feel like they're going to be squeezed into being like low quality AI written garbage content farms.

• 55:15Casey Newton?

  Well, I'm glad you brought that up because this is my big fear about the future of news is that right now so much digital media is supported by that kind of very quick, easy, cheap to produce material that probably has an affiliate link in it to buy something. And right now a junior staffer is being paid a living wage at a lot of places to bang out three or four of those posts every single day. Does that sort of job seem as at risk to you as it does to me?

• 55:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think if you are reorganizing and reframing the stuff that's already out there rather than reporting, bringing something new in, those are the jobs that are most vulnerable to AI.

• 55:57Kevin Roose?

  I want to talk about AI more because you at Semaphore have been experimenting with AI in ways that I've found really interesting and really different than a lot of publishers who I think are either trying to use this to churn out like low quality SEO bait or are just sort of scared of the whole thing and don't really know how to approach it yet or are having a bunch of meetings talking about how their AI strategy is going to look. So what is your AI strategy at Semaphore? And how are you thinking about this new world of generative AI?

• 56:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I guess we think about it as a tool. And in some sense, you know, I think we're trying to like work on the high end of really. Human created journalism where you know the person's name and she's a star and you feel connected to her and want to know what she thinks about her area of expertise. And so that's not, that's not in the realm of things that can be replaced by AI. But there are tools, I think that are just amazing. The video tools to me are the most, the most obvious.

• 56:51Kevin Roose?

  Like the text to video, like type in text and generates video?

• 56:54Speaker 06

  Joe Posner, who, who helped create Explained at Vox, you know, has been doing these videos for us that intersperse animation with, you know, videos and words and creating animation is something, you know, I don't know, $3,000, $10,000 a minute to do in the past. And he's working with this artist in Australia who's doing it, using stable diffusion for like, you know, for an amount that we can afford. It's not like we're, you know, putting some animator out of work. We just wouldn't be doing it. And I think just in the way that, you know, the creation of digital video with your phone suddenly meant a lot of people could create video. Some of these video tools are going to further mean that making movies is less a technical skill, still an incredibly competitive and difficult creative skill. But I think that's really powerful and interesting.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  And sure, it will also lead to all sorts of dumb scams and scary scams and, you know, popes wearing weird jackets and stuff. But if you still kind of have some connection to the notion of the internet as this democratizing force, it is the democratization of these really cool, interesting tools. And then just in terms of workflow, I mean, I don't think anybody looks at Grammarly, which is a pretty cool piece of software, and says like, this is a threat to journalism. I mean, it's a threat to like my constant typos, but I think there are AI tools that can make you a better writer. And there are also journalists who are not particularly good writers and people who didn't go to fancy schools, but who are great reporters and who the kind of hollowing out of editing in newsrooms left outside.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  There used to be rewrite, you know, rewrite men, get me rewrite, which meant that a reporter did not need to be a fancy writer. They could be a great reporter. And if, I don't know, if a reporter of mine wanted to gather some facts and put them into chat GPT before they filed them to me, look them over and file them and that made them feel better about it, like, fine.

• 58:42Casey Newton?

  You give this piece of advice to everyone. It's one I've taken very seriously myself. And that piece of advice is that scoops matter more than everything else in journalism. And I wonder if you believe that that is more true in a world where AI is generating at least the first draft of most of the stories that you're reading.

• 59:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think news gathering is the thing that's going to be really hard for AI to do. Not that, by the way, you can't think about like, huh, like, could I sort of script some kind of email that emails 50 of my sources and says, hey, do you know anything about this? And arranges their answers in a way that I can find really usable if it isn't too obnoxious and doesn't freak them out too much. I mean, sure, maybe. But yeah, I think the most human parts of journalism are the ones that are going to be hardest to replace. I like to think that fortunately, like media reporting is like the absolute most inside your own navel pursuit in like possibly human society. And so it's going to be like the last one hiding out from the robots.

• 59:41Casey Newton?

  I think all of us in this new AI world think that we secretly have the one job that is the least likely to be replaced by the robot.

• 59:49Kevin Roose?

  You were one of the first media executives I knew who sort of went all in on Twitter. You were a heavy, heavy tweeter. Everyone at BuzzFeed News was constantly tweeting all the time. It was a platform where you found writers and cultivated talent, but also where you distributed stories. What do you think the sort of diminishment of Twitter under Elon Musk has meant for the media? Do you miss the old Twitter? And so how are you thinking about Twitter as a part of the the media business going forward?

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  So somebody who had his brain basically kind of rewired by Twitter and really loved it for a while and met great sources, learned things on there. I mean, I'm pretty sad about it, honestly, personally. I do think that, you know, whether or not Elon had made certain decisions, people are sick of social media. People are leaving Facebook, not because its technical architecture is a little wrong way. It's because these are social products. They're like nightclubs. They're like bars. You go there because your friends are there. They fall out of fashion for like ineffable reasons and everybody leaves. And you can't, that's not a stoppable thing. The place can't get a new sound system and you'll come back. It's just culture. I mean, I think you can see the lights going out. I think Musk, in

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  some ways, drew a spasm of new attention to it on the way out. But I think basically people were going to leave.

• 1:01:09Kevin Roose?

  It's a really tough time in journalism right now. I mean, it sort of seems like it's always a tough time in journalism, but I think just the sort of news of BuzzFeed News closing down, people losing jobs at other outlets, economic troubles and the sort of dry up of advertising. There's a sense that there's sort of like a doom and gloom around the media industry right now. But there are some people who believe that the kind of death of social media and the traffic chasing that came with it is a good thing. Hillary Frey, who's the editor in chief of Slate, recently wrote a piece about this. And she wrote that, quote, "Being free of our reliance on tech platforms is going to be better for our business. The old traffic tricks don't work anymore.

• 1:01:51Kevin Roose?

  What does is great work and serving an audience who loves you so much they'll pay for you." That's actually always been the case with journalism. So is that something that you believe? Is this a good thing that we're sort of going back to the fundamentals of journalism and we're not sort of so obsessed with chasing this ephemeral social media traffic anymore?

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  You know, I'm a little reluctant to say that every technological or social change should be put into the good thing or bad thing bucket. I think Fox, BuzzFeed, Vice, other publishers did amazing journalism that mattered an enormous amount and had incredibly salutary effects. Gawker, Jezebel in its era, and the era changed and ended. And those businesses could have been run better and they could have maybe found a narrow path through, but the pendulum swung. And I think there will be things about subscription media and these sort of narrow cast substacks where you all you just have to, you know, tell your followers over and over exactly what they want to hear. And, and, you know, that is has its own problems. I mean, it's funny, people talk about echo chambers, but the echo chambers are the closed ones. That's why they echo.

• 1:02:54Speaker 06

  Basically, Twitter aren't echo chambers. They're something way crazier. And I think people are really eager to retreat back into echo chambers. It's probably much healthier to spend your time in an echo chamber than in like the wide open field screaming at a bunch of maniacs you hate. But that has its own challenges and problems and the most, many of the most successful substacks are the most partisan ones. Media is part of culture. It changes, it evolves, and there's, yeah, and I think it's, you know, I'm kind of reluctant to say, well, this one's a good one now. They're all bad at this degree.

• 1:03:26Casey Newton?

  Well, we've been talking a lot of stuff about the meat industry, but I think, can we at least agree that it actually is still the most fun business? Like that if you set aside all of the problems, that there is still nothing else that we personally would rather be doing, right?

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  It beats working for a living.

• 1:03:41Kevin Roose?

  Ben, thanks so much for coming.

• 1:03:43Casey Newton?

  Thank you, Ben.

• 1:03:44Speaker 06

  Thank you for reading the book.

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• 1:05:56Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We were edited this week by Paula Schuman and Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baetup, Marian Lozano, and Sophia Lammon. Special thanks to Pui Wing Tam, Nal Galogli, Kate LaPreste, Christopher Sprigman, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].

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