Buzz Machine

California is about to hand out $20 million — half from Google, half from the state — to news organizations, and it is wasting a golden opportunity.

In an urgent and provocative essay in Die Zeit, journalist Georg Diez calls for a redefinition of progress in the time of AI. Taking lessons from the genesis of progressivism — a response to the Industrial Revolution and the (first) Gilded Age — we cannot now surrender the power to decide society’s future to present technologists.

I am delighted that Montclair State University (MSU) has won its bid to take over New Jersey public television, for in this moment I see an opening to reimagine and reinvent public media in a new image — as the public’s media. And nowhere better for that to happen than in New Jersey, where threads have been coming together over years — most running through MSU — to support and grow the broader news ecosystem in the state.

Artificial Intelligence, though more than a half-century old as a technology, has occupied front-of-mind cultural consciousness for only a few years, since ChatGPT. Yet AI is already profoundly disliked and distrusted in both media meme and apparently in public opinion. The techlash against the internet and then social media took at least two decades to ferment, while the AI backlash feels more like an instant reflex.

Eddie Glaude, Jr., holds a mirror up to America. Look, he tells us, look! How often I have heard him on television, invited to the camera by Nicolle Wallace to lament another American tragedy and sin: racist murders, the shooting deaths of mere babies, the abuse of immigrant children, the bigotry of the president. Do not say that this is not us, he demands. This is us. This is America. The italics are his.

I am terribly saddened at word of the death of Donald Newhouse, the last great gentleman of the newspaper business. Soft-spoken, unassuming, humble, kind, and generous, Don Newhouse was at the same time a publisher of vast experience, universal respect, and great strength.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifca Humanitas, is a learned, wise, eloquent, and useful document that is only partly about artificial intelligence. Its lessons should be helpful to many modern institutions — including my own, journalism. For those expecting the Pontiff to declare holy war on AI and Silicon Valley, they will be disappointed. Those who wish to claim AI as a new religion will be similarly bereft.

We will not see Ted Turner’s visionary likes again. He broke free of the bounds of broadcast scarcity and recognized the opportunity to use satellite and cable to build national–then international–networks and brands: not just CNN but his “superstation.” He invented 24-hour news. Out of nonstop, round-the-clock news came a host of good–and bad–outcomes.

Sam Altman just published a set of principles for OpenAI, in which he asserts, “AI will dwarf what people could do with steam engines or electricity.” Uh, history would like a word, Sam. Sam believes that his talkative tool will dwarf powered transportation, powered industry, lighting, electronic communication, amplification, even computation. This is the hubris of the present tense. What follows in his principles is the kind of sophomoric banality only an LLM could produce.

Bloomsbury Academic is announcing the launch of a new book series: Intelligence: AI and Humanity. I’m humbled, delighted, and honestly amazed to say that I will be the series editor. Intelligence is a venue for writers from a wide array of fields and areas of expertise to reflect on artificial intelligence as a mirror to society and culture. Books in thisseries will not be technical — not about artificial intelligence as technology.