John Burn-Murdoch

So yeah, I think the question of how much real additional value is being generated by AI is going to continue to be this quite elusive beast.

And we will have much better answers even in a couple of years than we do today.

Yeah, so I find this stuff, I think this is a really important question to ask, is any new media form comes in and spreads across society.

So certain types of media tend to bring people towards the middle, and this has been true across histories.

Other ones sort of elevate fringe voices.

So if you think about things like books,

or newspapers back when the printing press first came around, you were essentially, because of the capital costs of starting up a newspaper publication or a book publisher, you are by default favoring like establishment mainstream voices.

And that's not to make a value judgment about whether that's good or bad, but that's part of the impact that that had.

Similarly, when television first came out, you had a small number of channels, again, because of the costs involved and because of regulation,

So they tended to elevate mainstream voices, at least at first.

What we then had with social media is something that is fundamentally polarizing.

It breaks through that establishment layer because anyone, anywhere can post to social media.

It therefore elevates those fringe views.

It amplifies negativity there.

far more so than many other media forms did in the past.

AI is this really interesting case where we seem to be going back to a moderating, establishment-favoring media, where

This seems to be happening for a few different reasons.

So one is that the information that these models are trained on, a huge amount of that has come from mainstream trusted sources.

Additionally, you have the fact that the business model for AI tools is quite different to social media.

So social media, like most of the