AI Revolution in Media: Insights from Tech Journalist Pete Pachal and Futurist Cynthia L Elliott

Ever wondered how AI could reshape the future of journalism and media? Join Citizen Journalist host and futurist Cynthia L Elliott alongside tech journalist Pete Pachal as they unravel the transformative effects of artificial intelligence in the most compelling way possible. Explore AI's journey from humble chatbots and Siri to sophisticated tools simplifying complex tasks and hear Pete's firsthand experiences in embracing these advancements. They discuss the rapid pace of AI's evolution and the potential seismic shifts it could bring to various industries, including journalism.

Join us for an intriguing discussion on how AI is revolutionizing creative industries. From Midjourney and Dolly altering the way images are sourced to the broader implications for stock imagery and music, Pete and Cynthia, aka as Shaman Isis, delve into how generative systems are rendering traditional methods obsolete. They also tackle the controversial topic of AI's impact on employment, offering a nuanced perspective on how companies might be leveraging AI as a pretext for workforce reductions. Additionally, they explore the current creative stagnation in Hollywood, attributing it to evolving consumption habits.

The future of AI isn't just about technology; it's also about ethics, privacy, and the monopolistic tendencies of tech giants. Cynthia and Pete explore these critical issues, discussing everything from the role of AI in content personalization to the monopolistic barriers smaller players face in the search engine market. With a cautious optimism, they highlight emerging AI-driven search platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT. Tune in to hear about Cynthia's new book, "A New American Dream: Conscious AI for a Future Full of Promise," and the groundbreaking initiatives at the SoulTech AI Foundation aimed at empowering underserved communities in the age of AI.

Enjoy the podcast teaser from Citizen Journalist 

Chapters

• 1:10 Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Technology
• 14:56 Impact of AI on Creative Industries
• 20:49 Evolution of AI Content Personalization
• 31:11 Future of AI and Monopolies
• 45:43 Exploring AI, Ethics, and Innovation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:10

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Citizen Journalist. I'm your host, shaman Isis, also known as Cynthia Elliott, author, speaker and like 50 other things because I'm old like that. I'm super excited to have you guys joining us in season two. We have an incredible episode for you today. We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence and this fourth industrial revolution that we find ourselves in Today. I'm joined by Pete Paschall, who's an AI pioneer. Honestly, you're teaching AI. You've got so many interesting aspects to your work, pete.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Paschall, I wish I was a pioneer.

Speaker 2: 1:45

I feel like constantly I'm coming from behind on this and, by the way, thank you so much for having me on and having this conversation. I'm really excited to chat AI with you, but I wouldn't say I jumped on the bandwagon. I have certainly been covering AI as a journalist, so I was a longtime tech journalist before I sort of made the leap to being an independent creator covering AI. But I jumped into it last fall when it was extremely apparent AI was going to change my profession, my chosen profession and industry journalism and media and so I dove in and just was completely determined to teach myself all I could about how to use it, how it was changing things, and then pass that knowledge on to people through the newsletter and some classes that I do. So that's my journey in terms of being immersed in AI, in other words, is somewhat short, but I'm glad I sort of had that background of covering tech for so long and, in particular, google and all of the stuff they did around AI to give me a little boost.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Yeah, it's such a. I find it fascinating. A lot of people some of our listeners may not know this, but AI has actually been around for a while now. We just haven't really recognized it as the AI we understand now, because it was in the form of chatbots and Siri and Alexa.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Yeah, various features and apps. You know you don't think of Google autocomplete or Gmail autocomplete so much as AI, but that's like a primitive form of AI and you know AI is defined in a number of different ways. I generally think of it as offloading human decision-making to a machine, and the more you do, I guess, the more AI AI-ified something is. But it is a term that is thrown around a lot and a label that's thrown around a lot and sometimes you really kind of have to separate AI reality from AI hype. I know that's obvious, but technically, like anything, a machine is kind of doing that a human could do and they required some kind of cognition. Is AI? Now we're just sort of talking about degrees of AI. Right, I don't think people think so much of the Gmail autocomplete as AI anymore. It's doing much more complex tasks, so a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1: 4:18

I love it. I'm a huge fan.

Speaker 2: 4:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:22

A funny story years ago. So I'm a futurist and I'm always thinking um ahead. It's it and it served. It served me really well in my career. But I've had two agencies and and I had this campaign idea pop into my head one day. I was like just ask watson. This is like 12 years ago when watson first came out. I sent them a letter but they never got back to me. I was like you guys, this is a great campaign idea, but it's because I was visualizing the future form of watson, where you could actually ask it anything. And uh, I'm pretty sure I found out later that the technology wasn't quite as evolved as all that.

Speaker 2: 4:57

Yeah, I'm kind of like surprised people haven't latched on to that old seinfeld episode more, where kramer is the movie phone guy, you know, and his whole line is why don't you just tell me what you want? That's essentially AI in a nutshell these days Like why don't you know, don't go through hoops, don't necessarily need to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Why don't you just tell me or ask me what you want and I'll just serve it up to you? That's at least a promise of it. There's obviously a lot of consequences to that on many levels the more we sort of go that way. But it's a sort of a remarkably prescient moment, even though I'm sure they didn't plan it that way.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot. It's going to change everything so radically yeah, it already is. Yeah, very much so, and it's going to happen a lot faster than it was predicted. I remember three years ago, people were talking about 20 years from now and I was like you guys, I have to tell you it was more like five to ten years. I was like on the outside and it's going to change every industry. So what's your favorite aspect of AI that you personally enjoy?

Speaker 2: 6:10

Oh, wow, that's a great question. I don't know if I've ever been asked that before. My favorite bit of AI I like the fact that it can stimulate a skill I don't have and get me to a point where I can do something, I guess, competently. That would have taken me a lot of time to just learn the skill and then a lot of time to apply that skill. A good example is I use Opus Clip a lot because you know I do my own podcasts.

Speaker 2: 6:42

And the idea of finding the right places to clip, the idea of clipping those elements from the podcast, the idea of doing captions and sort of very detailed editing to make sure it's all good, I can do that. I've learned a thing or two about Premiere Pro and whatever else and it's just, it takes me a while. You know it takes me a long time and I'm not a video editor by trade. It's just something I've sort of gotten to do because you know I want to do podcasts and so I had to learn some software. And now with something like Opus Clip and they should really be paying me for this, but I mean literally it's a drag and drop. You know like I just upload the file, it does virtually 90 of what I just described. Wow, and then you just kind of go in and trim out bits here and there just to make sure it's uh, it's, it's a complete thought or it's something that that you want and I'm sure, like a year from now, I might not even have to do that. Um, so that idea of like, wow, I'm not a video editor, but now I look like this totally competent professional clipper and editor and captioner, um, just through software, figuring all this stuff out for me, um, it's really, really impressive. Um, because it's like my trade as a journalist for the longest time was the written word Right.

Speaker 2: 8:09

So I I've written thousands of articles over the years, agonized over headlines and the right way to craft a lead and the perfect nut graph. And the thing I agonize the most over is conclusions. I really like to leave on sort of a high note. Thing I agonize the most over is conclusions. I really like to leave on sort of a high note and I do a lot of work to get an article in a state where I'm proud of it. And the thing is AI can't do that yet, not on like. In other words, it can't do, in terms of a creative process, that level of professionality and precision that a human does. Right now it can simulate aspects of that and then again things will get better.

Speaker 2: 8:49

But by and large like if an ai cranks out a draft of something, even if I've trained it on my own voice and stuff, it's still not quite there. I've still got to, like, do a decent amount of work to get it to a point where I could present it as my own um, but for someone less skilled as a writer you know who the written word isn't their profession. I feel like they'd feel the same way about that as I do about the video editing stuff. Right, because the video editor is going to look at what I do and say like, well, I can do that better, I could get in better footage and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2: 9:23

Yeah, but I did it in like 10 seconds and I'm not doing that. And so I think that sort of leveling up of everyone to sort of a competent level on many of these tasks and skill sets is one of the most magical parts of AI. It's sort of just equal. It gets everyone on an equal playing field. That's much higher than it was before. But it gets everyone on an equal playing field that's much higher than it was before, but you still need that human element to truly excel, and I think that's going to be around for a while.

Speaker 1: 9:52

It's amazing how much it's progressed. When I started using generative two years ago now, it was very obvious. I could even see the art influences. I loved.

Speaker 1: 10:06

I really went to a phase where I was doing ai art all the time because I'm an I'm an artist and it was fun to be able to whip things together using words too.

Speaker 1: 10:14

But, um, I could see the influences and I was like, hmm, you know, I can actually. I was like I know this, the guy who does this style is a fantasy painter and and that actually made me really. I was was like wait a minute, how are they doing this? That's what got me to dig deeper into AI, and now I'm really you know, the Soul Tech Foundation has the National Institute for Ethics and AI because I started to become really concerned that we weren't having enough conversations about the ethics of a lot of the things that were going on. It's like, how do you compensate all the artists and the writers? And that's something a lot of people don't seem to get because they think of it as it's writing, but it's actually using the talents of all of our past people to feed itself, and so it's interesting, I think there's. I mean as much as I love AI, I could also argue about some of the ways in which it was created.

Speaker 2: 11:07

Yeah, there's an interesting that you bring up authors and writing and I feel like there's been a lot of focus on articles and news and how that's getting ingested. And now when people ask for information on various topics, it's getting regurgitated and summarized by these AI engines and hey, there's not a lot of compensation there and we're starting to figure that out. Right, you're starting to see publishers make deals with big AI companies like OpenAI Perplexity, which is sort of famously this AI-powered search. They now have a revenue sharing program with publishers. So how long that takes to really shake out how lucrative that will end up being in the long run, we'll have yet to see.

Speaker 2: 11:53

But one thing that isn't talked about so much lately because I think the effects are less obvious in AI are books.

Speaker 2: 12:03

There's been a lot of books certainly ingested by these AI engines. They've kind of ingested the whole internet. So if your book is in some form out there, it's in there. And yes, there's been lawsuits and there's some deals being made with some of that level of publishing, but I don't think it's reached sort of the same level of interest, right, and again, I think it's because when you think about books, like you typically don't go and ask for a summary of a specific book, right, or it's hard to track an AI answer and whether it's attributed to like a book as opposed to an article, and I do feel like that that might be the next dimension after this sort of like, once publishing is sort of on its way, there's to being sort of figured out and maybe we get a couple of more fundamental rulings about what is okay to ingest, because that was sort of like that's sort of the big question that hasn't really been answered on a legal basis, like is it even okay to to crawl and then scrape public information?

Speaker 1: 13:13

yeah, I think. I think they did all of that as soon as possible because they knew regulations would be brought up. I don't doubt for a second that everything on youtube is already somewhere, oh for sure. And I asked, asked AI about a question. I was asking it to write something and I was surprised because it pulled something that I knew was only in my second book and I was like, how did it just do that? It just pulled some information that was in the book, the second book I'd written, and I thought that was really interesting.

Speaker 1: 14:00

I have a love-hate relationship with AI in that. I think it's amazing and I think it's going to be so transformative. There's so many areas. The book I have coming out September 7th is called A New American Dream and it posits the fact that we can utilize the age of AI the fourth industrial revolution, the fact that we can utilize the age of AI, the fourth industrial revolution, to help reignite countries' manufacturing and production and help rebuild the American dream, because it's collapsed due to greed. And so I love AI and in that book I used AI research, and I say that right up front because my first two books were just those were written by me completely. I was really capable of writing then, um, and so I I embrace it and I I love it for many aspects, but I do think that a lot of the creatives, uh, will get put out of business well, certainly in some industries that's much more stark than others.

Speaker 2: 14:56

You can already feel, if not see, a lot of what's happening around imagery, right.

Speaker 2: 15:02

So stock imagery is kind of dead because anyone can now go to a generative system, whether it's Midjourney, which just recently launched its web interface, that's going to be much easier than Discord, so usage of that is going to spike or Dolly or whatever, and you can get an image fairly realistic about virtually anything you want.

Speaker 2: 15:29

And I think about how, as a journalist, I would often write an article where the subject material would be more abstract. Right, it could be about like market movements or something like that, or sort of esoteric tech concepts, and you constantly hunt for this perfect stock image that doesn't exist. Hopefully it's on the service that your publication subscribes to, and then you eventually sort of settle for something. But now you can just plug your article into an engine and say give me an image that represents this article and then iterate a couple of times and you've got something. And you can do that for 20 bucks a month for some subscription. So the whole idea of these creative industries, I think, collapsing or the economics of them becoming very unfavorable very quickly. That is much more apparent in, I think, the imagery side of things than maybe the written side of things, because you could always sort of argue.

Speaker 2: 16:36

with articles like the fresh journalism that's coming out every day, it takes a while for AI engines to ingest that there's a value to it that people will continue to pay for in some form, whether it's advertising or what have you. And again, AI is obviously affecting that too, but the effect isn't as stark For imagery, in particular stock imagery, holy cow like. You can just see it immediately.

Speaker 2: 17:00

like this is going to change everything and they really need to figure out the legality of it and the economics of it. Uh, very, very quickly. And people are but, um, there's a lot of nuance to it. You know, like you mentioned asking for imagery in someone's style, for example, how does that work and can you license your style, which is something that maybe was done in a where anyone with a distinctive style of either photography or art could go to some centralized platform and then license that out? This is already sort of starting to happen in music.

Speaker 2: 17:49

I was just recently at an AI conference and I met a guy who was building a platform. He was very well connected in the music industry and he's building essentially that platform that will allow artists music artists to record their voice or essentially provide their voice in a licensed way, and so it's taking what's already happening in a you know, obviously in an ad hoc way, someone will take I don't know Drake's voice or Taylor Swift's voice and create a, a new song with that and then somehow make a lot of money on it by by putting it on spotify. Even with the ai disclosure, right, they're not trying to fool you into thinking this is something these artists did. It's like hey, this is an ai song I just created. Well, the artist, you know, I think most people agree the artist, who whose voice that is, should probably be compensated.

Speaker 2: 18:37

Yeah. So but rather than preventing this from happening, regulating against it, putting in excessive copyright which I think you know, copyright is important, but the history of copyright protection has always sort of been an overreach but by creating a platform that allows for that to happen in a, uh, licensed way, in a sort of legally safe way, uh, with the right veto power by any party, um, makes a lot of sense and and could actually be a great revenue stream for these artists if they're popular enough and people want to use their stuff. So I think that that'll happen. Some form of that will probably happen with visual media. Like I said for publishing, it's kind of starting to happen in a different way.

Speaker 1: 19:26

It's interesting to see how many industries we were talking before we started filming about how some industries and companies are using AI as just an excuse to trim the fat. If you will, I look at it as just being greedy, but that's me. I grew up in the 70s, when companies actually took care of their people. Those were the days.

Speaker 1: 19:52

Yeah, there's collapse going on all around us and I don't mean to be alarmist sounding, but I mean Hollywood has been gutted in the last year and everyone's saying it's AI. Do you think that's it or do you just think that things are going through? Our consumption habits have changed and that's what's having the effect yeah, I would say the latter mostly to be qualified.

Speaker 2: 20:16

I don't work in Hollywood, I'm not an expert on it, but I know a lot of people who are and I've interviewed a few for the media co-pilot, and there's definitely been a bit of a creative glut that Hollywood is in. I mean you can see sort of the performance of what has been their go to franchise, the superhero movie and with Deadpool and Wolverine being the exception, most of them have not done super great. So Hollywood goes through these sort of creative crises every decade or so and they sort of figure out some way forward. But I think what's happening now is what you mentioned. There's a sort of like a change in user habits that predates what we think of as AI. I mean you see sort of the attention splintering in things like YouTube and TikTok and the rise again of user-generated content right, which was a thing 20 years ago and now it's a new thing again. But I think what you know people have figured out is sort of the right platforms and the right way to serve these things up. I mean TikTok, the effect on that, on youth and attention spans and whatever else, has been massive, you know. I mean YouTube would never have launched its shorts if TikTok hadn't sort of cracked the code on the short video format. Crack the code on this short video format. So I think we're seeing largely a move to that formatting and that sort of attention splintering, which I think has been the biggest challenge for Hollywood.

Speaker 2: 21:49

But, that said, ai is certainly a part of that. You know, not just in terms of the content people are serving up. A lot of people are starting to serve up interesting takes on AI and using AI to build videos, and they can even in a way that isn't necessarily spamming and throwing out just tons of crap, but using it in ways that you know, doing great special effects that Hollywood studios would have spent millions of dollars on just a few years ago. But the bigger thing is, ai now knows us much better, and this isn't necessarily what we think of as the generative AI, the stuff that we've mostly been talking about, the AI of analyzing big data sets and, in this case, user data. Like what do you like? What did you scroll up on? What did you comment on? What did you spend time on and not necessarily like and really understanding how to keep us engaged on these things that aren't movies and longer form stuff.

Speaker 2: 22:46

Again, you could certainly argue the health of this, and that's probably not healthy for people in attention spans, but the power of AI to give you ultra personalization, um isization, is very, very apparent. And if you pair that with generative AI, so the two different kind of flavors of AI one understanding audience, essentially, and then serving up exactly what that audience wants. Even if you don't have it right, you can generate it. Or take something you do have and tailor it for the person you know. Like good example, what we're seeing right now with big newspapers, so the New York Times, the Washington Post, some others are giving you spoken word articles and so, again, this is more ai, it's voice cloning, ai, but they'll, uh, essentially have a default voice and they'll have every article spoken to you in this default voice.

Speaker 2: 23:44

And some apps have gone even further with that and done.

Speaker 2: 23:47

We'll have snoop dogg read it to you, or gwyneth paltrow or what have you. Um, but the idea that it's not too far from that idea to say like, well, don't just speak the article to me, speak it to me in a way that does it in five minutes, not 20. Or speak it to me with this background music, or give me a playlist of articles that's actually starting to become a feature in some of these. So it's this ultra customization of my experience that you can apply generative technology to, and I think within five years we're going to have like almost it's not so much a topic bubble like the filter bubbles we talk about, but you're going to have kind of a bubble of your own experience on how you consume news and media, if you sort of take maybe you're a podcast person, maybe you're a person who likes summaries, maybe you're a person who likes to stretch out with things and you're going to be able to kind of uh, customize that experience to an extent that you really couldn't before so interesting.

Speaker 1: 24:51

Uh, you know, I I'm I'm very excited about a lot of the changes that are coming in, because I really believe that ai can, if we ahead of it, which is we're already getting behind it. The fact, you know it reminds me right now, reminds me a little bit of in the early 2000s, when I was whining, pointing out that I was concerned about Google and the numbers. I was like you guys don't understand the power of this, and people were like oh you know it's just a search engine.

Speaker 1: 25:19

I was like, no, you don't understand. This is allowing a company to decide. I'm like eventually they will be deciding what stories they think you should be consuming and which ones that they would rather suppress. That is already happening and it's going to get worse, especially as they become because the companies, the longer they're around, the more involved in politics they get and I'm a big fan of google, but, um, they do have too much control over what the average person sees. So, so, as a somebody who spent 20 years in marketing and pr, um I I I became very concerned at the results that would show up, because it's the same media outlets, over and, over and over again, who have their own narrative, and I was like this is not healthy.

Speaker 1: 26:06

Years ago, when I first started using Google, the search engine results would push, would present to you you know. Basically, it was kind of like a rolling the dice you just get, you know whatever it thought it was ranking the highest, but there was nothing really being. It wasn't agendized. But the results are definitely that way now, and last year I got kind of obsessed with this idea. Oh, I was like, you know, I could actually reverse engineer. This was a terrible idea at the time but I thought it was genius anyway. It's kind of mad genius, but I was like wait a minute, if content is influencing AI, because it's reading content, then you can actually influence AI by the kind of content that it's reading. So if you put out a bunch of stories for big brands that position a brand, you could literally erase its past history and replace it with a new narrative and I was like that's a new angle on PR agencies.

Speaker 1: 26:54

And then I was like, wait, that's not a very good idea, cindy, what's up? Weaponizing AI so that brands could write their history. But it was going to happen anyway. I just find all of that super interesting.

Speaker 2: 27:08

There's an interesting quirk. You know there's a lot to touch on in what you're talking about, but there's an interesting quirk with AI. I actually got a credit uh, I forget the writer, but it was. It was in the neiman lab uh newsletter and they observed that some of the information that these large language models have ingested is actually no longer on the web like they. It's. It's kind of gone away, uh, whether it's bad archiving or deliberate action or whatever, and yet that information can still manifest in an answer and maybe that will even perpetuate into new versions.

Speaker 2: 27:50

So we have what is it? Gpt 4.0? Now, right, so GPT 5 and 6. I'm not quite sure how chat GPT decides5 and 6, I'm not quite sure how ChatGPT decides to deprecate things, but I don't know if the mere absence of a webpage then means they would deprecate it. I think there's cases for and against that, but assuming it doesn't get deprecated and it continues on, I'm not sure what. I honestly don't know if this is bad or good. Right, because there's a sense of, like the internet. You know it's dead, the data is dead, but we'll always remember it. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 28:25

Like you know, a relative dies that's kind of the thing you say, and maybe that's a good thing that large language models remember this dead data Because, as a journalist one of the most this is a very frustrating thing for journalists is that if you've had a long career, if you're lucky enough to been writing for a while, you'll find that some of the publications you wrote for years ago go out of business or get merged or they have a bad uh migration with their cms and you, if you haven't archived your own work, you will lose that work work even if you have like links to it. And it's very frustrating because it's like there's no central archive. I mean there's the Wayback Machine, but it's very sketchy right, like you know. Good luck finding your stuff in the Internet Archive, but if it's in a large language model somewhere, maybe it lives on, you know.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Yeah, it presents an interesting situation because, know and I think for me, mine is you know, history is so important because we can, we use it to learn from, uh, and we know that history gets written by the winners. Uh, you know, just looking at how heavily edited something like the bible is and this isn't about religion, I mean anybody who knows anything about editing will tell you that it's been edited heavily and repeatedly by people translated too.

Speaker 1: 29:37

There was a lot of uh liberties taken yeah, yeah, and, and you know when I think about it's like you know you can rewrite your history in ai because it's the new search engine. I find my, my google searches have dropped probably by 50, because I usually hop into perplexity or or chat gpt to look something up. Anyway, it is interesting. I think this is what you've reminded me of an angle that drives me crazy about technology. So, because most of the people that work in tech are men when they design and engineer a lot of these things which is one of the reasons why we created the Soul Tech Institute, the National Institute for Ethics and AI because it was like these are things that were not being talked about and we talk about being ethical and fair and not biased. But it's like, even when they designed Google, as a woman who's been around for 25 years, you have to actually know in business, that is, you have to actually know all of my names to actually see my work, and even then, excuse me, and even then a lot of it's disappearing. So the proof of a lot of the results of the history of work that I have as a female is unfindable and unprovable. But the unfindable part is because when they designed the way that the systems were working. They didn't give you the option of connecting your personalities, if you will. So, men, when they set it up, they didn't think about the fact that women's names change. Does that make sense? So, unless you know that I've been married and know those specific names, you can't actually see that and there's no mechanism for fixing that.

Speaker 1: 31:11

And it doesn't sound like a big deal, but what most companies do before they interview somebody or consider hiring somebody, is they go Google them, they go look them up and they see what's there. And people are dismissing that as like, not important. It's like, oh, it would be interesting if I how about if I took all of your stuff off the internet and then? And then you experience people telling you that they can't find anything about you, you don't exist as a human being, then maybe perhaps you'll begin to understand that it's actually important, it's a fundamental design flaw, and that when they built the search engine, they didn't consider the fact that women have multiple names. And how do they actually address that outside of it? And I've had people actually say, well, get a Wikipedia page, it's like you do. People know that you have to pay for those.

Speaker 1: 31:54

I don't think most people know that you have to pay for those. It just I think it's interesting and it highlights that thing that I'm talking about, which is there's aspects of what is happening right now that's not being talked about because it's happening at such a rapid pace.

Speaker 2: 32:11

I actually didn't know you had to pay for those. That's something I just learned today. But I guess if you reach a certain level of notoriety, so one just appears.

Speaker 1: 32:21

Yeah, I mean if you come out and you have the number one album in the world, they're going to probably do a page for you. But unless you're at that scale, I would say 90% of all Wikipedia pages for people that are live now they pay. The platform is free. There's no other way to get somebody to see. It's a lot of work actually, because I've owned two agencies so I've had clients say hey, can we get a Wikipedia page? Absolutely Anybody can get a Wikipedia page if they have enough citations and success in their history. It's interesting, it's like $800 to $2,000.

Speaker 2: 33:01

Gotcha and do you pay the agency?

Speaker 1: 33:04

It's usually well, you can pay an agency to do it, but it's usually they're hiring people usually from like Fiverr places like that. These are Wikipedia editors who've worked really hard to kind of build up their access and ability.

Speaker 2: 33:17

Ah, I see Got it. So it's still a little bit unofficial in terms of like how wikipedia works, but it's just how it works in the real world.

Speaker 1: 33:26

Yeah, yeah. Commit all this time to building a page for somebody that it's not like, say, somebody they're a huge fan of.

Speaker 2: 33:33

Yeah yeah, well, I mean the google thing, I mean it's it's Well, I mean the Google thing I query it simply wouldn't succeed, right. So I but I definitely share in a lot of the frustration that you talked about earlier, like in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I was working for NBC Universal and doing a tech blog for them, and this was actually I could, when you actually could get someone to reply to your emails like a human, which is no longer the case, certainly and they I was trying to get it listed on Google News and you had to jump through all these hoops, and I understand that the, the level of, of quality or whatever that they wanted to maintain through all these hoops, and I understand that the level of quality or whatever that they wanted to maintain was a big factor. But to the point of it's not going to surface interesting things done by niche players or upstarts, that choice alone reinforces the status quo and I'm very interested to see how things will play out now that a lot of the concerns that we've been alluding to, which is to say, is Google a monopoly? Is that generally bad for an information ecosystem, even if their intent is benign? That's kind of been answered. The government has stepped in and finally made this declaration. Now there's going to be an appeal. Obviously intent is benign. Um, that's, you know, kind of an answer. You know it's there. The government has stepped in and finally made this declaration. Now there's going to be an appeal. Obviously there's going to be a process.

Speaker 2: 35:24

Nothing's changing overnight, um, but uh, it makes me, um, I'm almost hesitant to say hopeful because I don't want to sound too biased, but it does make me hopeful for a more competitive future where players like Perplexity can come in and potentially have not necessarily a better search product from a technical aspect, but have something that better matches the needs and habits of a future audience. And what does that do to the marketplace? With a Google that might be separated, so that search and advertising and all the other interesting things they do are kind of separate, that could be a new era of chaos, certainly, but from chaos comes a new order that's generally stronger than before, right? So it does feel like we're at that point, and AI will simply be an accelerant to all this, because it's completely changing habits. Like you see yourself, you're doing the perplexity more often than you were. Google, and same here I'm doing. Perplexity, chat, gpt, and same here I'm doing perplexity, chat, gpt, various other chatbots and the stuff I'm searching for, or just information.

Speaker 2: 36:52

I want less and less of that is served by a page of links, but that's only what Google offers offers. I mean, they're obviously doing their own overviews, but I kind of feel like the the attachment of my expectation of that page of links is still there, regardless of what google is actually giving me right, like I would, I would argue that I think most people would get an ai overview uh, at least a significant number of them probably just scroll down because they're like what is this? I'm not sure what it is. I know google gives me the links, show me the links, and then there's always been, you know, the last few years certainly which is part of the reason, um, maybe the mousetrap is getting a little dusty is that there's a lot of sponsored links, there's a lot of boxes, oh, and that whole thing that happened the other day?

Speaker 1: 37:35

uh, they busted the, the. And this isn't about politics, it's about an example. Google had to say oh gosh, that fell through the cracks. They found out that the Democrats were taking news articles, relabeling them, giving them new headlines.

Speaker 2: 37:54

Oh right.

Speaker 1: 37:54

Basically further endorsed Kamala and that they were all showing up in their things and Google's like, oops, we don't know how that happened. It's like I'm sorry, but I find that so hard to believe. It's kind of karmic that they ended up getting called out for being a monopoly. But this is what happens. Like we've all known, they were a monopoly for 25 years or 20, maybe more, like 22 years. I mean, come on on, they've been a monopoly and at this point it's almost impossible to scrape, scrape back on uh, you know the, the power that they've accumulated yeah I just hope in ai.

Speaker 1: 38:31

Um, one of my big concerns is that it's like the same people who control so much already and have their fingers in everybody's phones and data, and the fact that we've even let that happen and that it's never been fixed. You know, like the zucker bergs of the world, um, being able to basically find out when you go to the bathroom what you ate for breakfast, you're, you're dating like it's. It's really epic and everybody now has access to all that and I just don't understand how we got. And everybody now has access to all that and I just don't understand how we got there. We have a tendency to do that and I'm I do have concerns with ai that a few very powerful people have already scraped everything they want and they're positioning it how they want and we may never be able to get it back to, to unwind that knot well, if the new york times succeeds in a lawsuit, um, and there's a very definitive ruling there, we could be in a future where all these models get have to be thrown out.

Speaker 2: 39:26

I don't think that's going to happen, by the way.

Speaker 2: 39:27

I do think whatever ruling is made, yeah, there's just going to be like some fine, and then we'll figure out how to go forward, probably. I mean, you know, we'll see, we'll see how it uh, how it shakes out. But you know, like I'm actually really interested, uh, assuming there is some kind of breakup to google and again that's a big assumption right, there's still appeals, um, that that's didn't quite happen to microsoft, even though that ruling definitely hurt them in the long term and had them in microsoft's case in their famous antitrust relief in 2000,. That sort of paved the way for Google and for other companies, because Microsoft was kind of had its hands tied in terms of the markets it wanted to compete in, even though it wasn't broken up. But assuming there's sort of a broken up future, I'm really fascinated to see where the AI actually goes right, because Google has search and it also has ads and it also has Google G Suite. It's got a few different things. But the point is it's applying AI across all of these.

Speaker 2: 40:30

And if the AI is still paired with search, I'm not sure if that's a healthy outcome, because you can see already the conflict they sort of have as both an AI foundation model provider and a search engine that's trying to give you the best content, right, because their official stance on what they surface in search results is that, well, we don't care if it's human written or if it's AI written, as long as it's good information, we're going to surface it and that's probably like, on a first principles level, the correct stance.

Speaker 2: 41:10

But there's a you know, in the real world kind of reality here of, well, yes, not all AI is spam, but pretty much all spam today is AI.

Speaker 2: 41:24

You know, like any, if you're a spammer, you are of course using AI to create your content, whether you're spamming via email or spamming just the internet with lots of content that you hope is going to rank. So it's got to be some kind of signal. And I again I don't know quite how, certainly, like I don't have inside information on Google, but there has to be a certain amount of conflict of like, well, I want to filter out more of this AI crap, but is that going to hurt our business in the long term, because we have a vested interest in our AI technology succeeding. So that to me is like sort of the most immediate and apparent conflict of interest in this current sort of world, and it would be interesting to see if the foundational model business just becomes its own thing, so that business just competes with open AI and anthropic or whatever and just doesn't do anything else which seems like it would be probably the most straightforward outcome.

Speaker 2: 42:26

Um, and then search, and and all their other stuff. Just sort of get spun out and all these other businesses be very cool, very interesting.

Speaker 1: 42:33

I'm wondering how, cause I know there's a sort of a settling within AI right now cause they're realizing that, uh, the chat GPDs of the world are awesome, but I think they were hoping to see a more immediate financial windfall from it, and I think they're struggling a little bit to figure out how to monetize it. And then, on the other opposite end, you've got robots, which are already rolling out in Asia, of course, because're always like ahead of us, um, because they stay focused, uh, they don't let things get distracted, um, as easily. But, um, you know, robots will be in every. We're already to some level.

Speaker 2: 43:10

We're already cyborgs you know, this has turned us into cyborgs, um, already, but uh, it's.

Speaker 1: 43:19

It's going to be interesting in five to ten years. You know, people are going to be getting I was thought about this besides me, besides being actual cyborgs, and people will be getting body modification. That's tech based um. It's going to be a really interesting future and it's coming so fast and and so if you're, if you're the chat gpts of the world, I think they're kind of like, okay, how are we going to make money out of this? And then, on the other end, you've got robotics and a lot of the interesting cool technology. I'm a mindfulness teacher, a consciousness teacher, and so I'm really fascinated by the instruments that are using biofeedback and they're doing brain scans and telling runners how much oxygen they have. It's mind-blowing. So I guess I don't know why I'm sharing all that. I just want my brains like listen to all these toys and whistles and all the cool stuff that's coming.

Speaker 2: 44:10

Well, there is a thing, a point of view that I think is a little disturbing if you think about it, as more technology has progressed with search engines and web 2.0 and sort of the centralization of online thinking and habits, and now with AI, where these summaries are giving you this sort of homogenized view of the world, and, by and large, a lot of these AI models work very similarly with the same data sets, are we all starting to think the same?

Speaker 2: 44:43

You know in in sort of very real ways, and I this. There's a sort of natural end point to this, and you brought up cybernetics and things like neural link, and so if that sort of becomes a thing that isn't just for disabled folks and it becomes something we all just sort of have thinking the same stuff and we all just feel like everyone should have be part of this collective hive mind, uh, and then over time, that just becomes what everyone does, and then we forcibly make people to be a part of it hundreds of years from now. I mean, that's the nightmare, dystopian future, um, that we know I'm amazed at people.

Speaker 1: 45:35

so I, as a consciousness teacher, I'm very much involved in my intuition and I read energy all the time. I know when somebody's lying to me. I always have. For decades I've been able to predict a lot of interesting things, like, just as an example, I got in a car with a guy once and when he got out I turned to my assistant and I said he is going to be on the Bachelor in a year and then a year after that he's going to come out as gay and he's going to get another TV show. And she was like what? I was like no, don't ask me, these things come to me.

Speaker 1: 46:06

And I bring that up because you brought up Neuralink. And I find it fascinating because what it posits is that not only we've created a computer that can do something that we don't think humans can do, because I'll have people go oh, you're psychic, and I'm like I hate that word but we are all capable of reading each other. If we were just present, I don't think it's like it is. It's a great power to have, but I don't think it's superhuman. I think it's quite human and and and what I was so glad to see Neuralink they call it something that refers to being telepathy, that it is literally reading the thoughts and performing what the person's thinking. But it also, I realized, wait a minute, if that's coming, does this mean that we're all going to be walking down the streets going? Did you hear what he was thinking?

Speaker 2: 46:58

Could be Someday. I think that might be inevitable. Like in terms of technology, it all comes down to whether or not you think human consciousness has something special to it, or is there a process, is it something that we may already be sort of simulating the basicness of with generative AI? And you know there's sort of a dark take on that in a book called the Circle that came out some time ago, about 10 years ago now, think there is hope for people to sort of put in the right barriers and the right. I guess digging the right ditches to ensure sort of the flow of this river that we're on will steer us in the right direction.

Speaker 2: 47:51

And you know, again, technology is wondrous but you need to have your checks, your balances. Your respect for privacy is kind of one of the things that obviously this, what we're talking about now, um, is strongly matters too. And uh, yeah, I mean again, like I I don't necessarily think, uh, intervention's always good. You know you can stymie innovation, and innovation is something that's really really important to ensure we do keep keep progressing forward and sort of coming up with new ideas. But something like the executive order on AI that came out last year, you know there are. You can quibble with whatever provisions are in it, and I think there has been a lot of quibbling. Provisions are in it and I think there has been a lot of quibbling. But the thrust of it, the idea like, okay, this, these big societal, uh things that can be affected by the application of this tech at scale, like everyone has a stake in that, and so it is. It is proper for the government to come in and have an interest.

Speaker 2: 48:54

I think, as, as the rep, you know supposedly our representatives anyway, and so I'm not going down that rabbit hole, but I mean, it's the outlet that we have to have that voice, and so, yeah, let's figure it out.

Speaker 1: 49:09

They're going to have to pass a law that says that you're not allowed to read people's thoughts without their permission, or people are going to be walking around wearing helmets all the time, or something.

Speaker 2: 49:19

Well then people will be the snake oil salesman saying that this is the helmet that blocks it, even though it's just like wood or something like that.

Speaker 1: 49:27

Oh, my gosh Pete, this has been such an incredible conversation. You know normally I only do like half an hour, but it's been so much fun speaking to you and learning all about you know the work that you do.

Speaker 2: 49:45

I would love for you to share with our listeners um, uh, your about your newsletter and your work and where people can find you? Sure, I'm on substack at the media co-pilot so you can google that or just go to media co-pilotsubstackcom. Please subscribe. I also offer uh classes that I mentioned for creative teams or individuals. If you want to learn the ins and outs of AI and how to use it, how to apply it to creative work in ethical ways, then please check it out at mediacopilotai and check out the learn section and I've got quick classes like one hour basics. I have a three hour class where I really get nice and deep and, again, I tailor these for people in creative fields, especially professionals. So like journalists, marketers, pr professionals that's what I focus on. If you want to upskill and uplevel your work in any of those areas, call me, get in touch. You can also email me at pete at mediac copilotai, if you have any questions about any of that.

Speaker 1: 50:43

Very cool, very cool. What an excellent episode for our season two. You guys, thank you so much for listening. If you're not already, you know, subscribed, what are you thinking? Intelligent listening on citizen journalist is something that you need regularly in your life. Uh, if you would like to learn more about, uh, my books, um, please go to shaman isiscom. I do have a new american dream, uh conscious ai for a future full of promise, coming out on september 8th, 7th. Uh, you can pre-order it now. I'm'm very fortunate that it hit number one in all of its categories. You can also find out about my memoir, memory Mansion, on my website, and if you'd like to find out about the work that I do at the SoulTech AI Foundation, visit soultechfoundationorg. We are committed to helping underserved communities thrive in the age of AI by teaching them core AI skills as well as mindset, so that they can move from survival mode to thriving mode. Anyway, that's at celltechfoundationorg. Pete, thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 51:53

Well, thank you so much, I had so much fun, and congratulations on the book. Thank you, Thank you.

Speaker 1: 51:58

Yeah, I appreciate it. We'll speak to you soon. Okay, bye, you guys, have an amazing week. Take care, thank you.