The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

What happens when AI models try to fill the gaping hole in the media landscape where journalists should be?

More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes

This week Alix is joined by Nic Dawes, who until very recently ran the non-profit newsroom The City. In this conversation we explore journalism’s new found toxic relationship with AI and big tech: can journalists meaningfully use AI in their work? If a model summarises a few documents, does that add a new layer of efficiency, or inadvertently oversimplify? And what can we learn from big tech positioning itself as a helpful friend to journalism during the Search era?

Beyond the just accurate relaying of facts, journalistic organisations also represent an entire backlog of valuable training data for AI companies. If you don’t have the same resources as the NYT, suing for copyright infringement isn’t an option — so what then? Nic says we have to break out of the false binary of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’

Further reading & resources:

• Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward — NPR
• Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society — Reuters Institute
• An example of The City’s investigative reporting: private equity firms buying up property in the Bronx — 2022
• The Intimacy Dividend — Shuwei Fang
• Sam Altman on Twitter announcing that they’ve improved ChatGPT to be mindful of the mental health effects — “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but…”

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