John Burn-Murdoch

Digital media innovations of the last 15 years ended up being predominantly ad funded.

So it was all about attention.

It was all about eyeballs.

And therefore, you're incentivized to say sensationalist things, shocking things.

AI, the winning business model seems to be making it very useful for people in the business world.

That means the inner workings of this technology reward being correct.

There's not much point having an AI tool which tells you what you want to hear if that's going to mean it tells you the wrong thing, you put the wrong thing in your report, you...

give your investors the wrong information.

So all of these subtleties about how the technology differs mean that when you ask or when you talk to these AI tools and different models about issues of politics and ideology, and I don't necessarily mean explicitly asking them these questions, but as these issues come up from time to time in different conversations, they tend to give you fairly mainstream, straight down the middle, moderate answers.

And therefore to the extent that these conversations do end up shaping how people think about the world they will hopefully and the evidence suggests they will bring people back away from those fringe extreme views and towards a more factual view of the world.

Honestly, I'm always trying to think, why would this be interesting to someone?

And how many people would find this interesting?

So I will, as I'm doing my analysis, I'll be generating like, I don't know, 20 charts per piece of work that I'm working on just as I go through that process.

And then with each of those charts, I'm thinking, well...

is this interesting?

Is this only interesting to me or could this be interesting to more people?

Is this telling people something they already know or telling them something new?

And if it is telling someone something they already knew, that's not necessarily a bad thing if it's really crystallizing this vague idea they had.

But yeah, all sorts of trade-offs and decisions around that, but fundamentally based on this idea of thinking, how can I make this speak to as many people as possible?

I honestly think we're probably past the bottom.