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AI Gets Into Publishing
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Andrew Keen
It's Saturday, 29th of March, 2025. This show probably won't go out till Sunday the 30th, but I know we have a live audience. So welcome all of you. It's been an interesting week in technology and media. The big news story broadly of the week is... Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic's Big Get on the Signal chat. It's called SignalGate. So it shows still the relevance of defiant journalism. And I think the strength of the owners of The Atlantic, Lauren Jobs, whose commitment to free journalism reflects very well on her and very much can be contrasted with Jeff Bezos' fold in the face of Trumpian threats. But for Keith Teer from That Was The Week, it's not a week of humans, it's a week of AI when it comes to media and technology. His front page of That Was The Week this week is AI gets into publishing. Publishers are noticing. I wonder whether this might be a more appropriate... title, Keith, for something we bring out on April the 1st, All Fool's Day, because isn't this obvious? Doesn't everybody know that AI is getting into publishing? What happened this week that makes it any more or less certain?
I think up until now, the discussion has mainly been about AI training on the output of publishers. But what happened this week is that OpenAI launched a brand new completely brand new image creation tool that for the first time is creating content that can be used by publishers, good enough to be used by publishers.
So this is their AI image generator that they're offering.
Words and timings
SothisistheirAIimagegeneratorthatthey'reoffering.
Keith Teare
Yeah, and it's not, it's probably, image generator probably is a word that disguises how profound the software is that they've shipped. And it got caught up in this whole example of using Ghibli-like renditions of photos. You know, the whole narrative got reduced down to that, but actually what they've released is something that technically speaking is a huge breakthrough
And this art, I mean, you and I disagree, I think, on this. I mean, the art, for people listening, you'll have to imagine a photo of a character surrounded by newspapers. AI gets into publishing. I know it made this image. I mean, it's not a bad image, but it's not a great one. What's the big deal about it?
Well, actually, the interesting thing, Andrew, is the words on the image. Anyone who's ever tried to do image generation on AI knows that AI can't do words on images. Why? Because it's a probabilistic guessing technology.
So just to be clear for people who aren't able to watch or just listening, the images of newspapers with... thousands, probably tens of thousands of words on them. So is this the breakthrough that we've got newspapers now with words on them? You can't actually read the newspaper, the words on it.
No, Andrew, it's my words. It's the title of the article. AI gets into publishing. Publishers are noticing. The top left hand, that was the weak logo, and the edition number, 2025, number 12, all of that would have been impossible. The The picture of the newspapers would have been possible before, but putting these overlays on top would have been impossible.
So what you're saying is that this new version of ChatGPT connects images and words, and if you give it an image to create, it will create the words with it?
Well, you shouldn't reduce it down to one image that I did in two minutes. What you've got to get head around is up until now, no AI in the world could have produced that image, that whole collection. It would have been impossible. So now you have got within AI what Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat can do, but without needing them.
Your next version of ChatGPT needs to be able to kill dogs on podcast shows. So I'm still, I have to admit, I get kind of what you're saying, Keith, but I still don't really see the big deal.
Well, you have to think ahead, Andrew. You have to. I'm trying. Let me ask you this question. When we talk about what jobs AI will be able to replace, Graphic design and layout were not one of them up until now.
Did you get out of bed on the wrong side this morning? Full of graphic designers. I think graphic designs are awesome in general. But You know, this AI breakthrough means that AI is now a publishing tool. Just to give you an anecdote, this week I spent time again building software using AI and I built something called Creator Automation. Anyone listening, if you go to creatorautomation.ai, you can sign up for it. It's really only for newsletter producers. But what I do is I suck in all of the articles that I read every day And the AI goes and creates snippets and summaries and creates my newsletter for me. So that's what I mean about AI getting into publishing. Suddenly, I can do things automatically that previously were manual.
So let's talk about graphic design. I mean, in all seriousness, obviously I don't celebrate graphic designers losing their jobs, but the smart graphic designers are able to put together images and words in a very creative way. I mean, this is not very creative.
I mean... AI gets into publishing. Publishers are noticing. I mean, I don't need some... multi-billion dollar ai platform to to put that together for me i mean i could have done that in like under one second myself not under one second you do you maybe two
gets into punishment? No, no, you're not getting it. This is like a template, right? Every week, that was the week, looks like this, just in the way that the Atlantic has a look. It was able to understand my look exactly. recreate it for a new version using my editorial as the base to conjure up a front page using my template that looks as if I did it.
Right, so coming back to our friend, the maybe out of work graphic designer, it doesn't sound to me like this is much of a challenge because you still need that essential human creativity.
That's your graphic design. There it is. So basically, you can have it. You can even say to it, I think this sucks, do a better version, and it probably will.
Yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll have to see. So do you think that your covers are going to get more intelligent in the future? Are you going to come with bad things like AI gets into publishing, publishers are noticing?
I think you're reducing the enormity of the week down to something small. The enormity of the week is that AI is going to become a very, very good tool threatening things like Photoshop and Affinity and all the other graphic design tools because it's good enough, it's simple. I actually think it's very good. And by the way, I didn't... fully explain it, but what it's doing is it's imagining the final product when you do a prompt and it's guessing the pixels one at a time to make it. So because it's already got the final product, it doesn't make mistakes on words, for example, whereas the previous generation started with nothing and guessed the next pixel without really knowing where it was going. So it was hit and miss whether it was any good.
I wonder whether this is going to have any impact on physical magazines. One of the other pieces you linked to from the information this week is how a 30-year-old magazine, Fast Company, is embracing creators. Do you think that... this kind of technology that you're talking about, this new image generation, is it going to make physical magazines more or less dead?
Well, it's interesting. I don't know what you think. I think the word creators is kind of an ensemble word to describe anyone doing video, audio, text, magazines, newsletters. And I think what Fast Company did this week, which is what that story is about.
To be kind to Fast Company or maybe unkind to Fast Company, I think the magazine became irrelevant about 20 minutes, 30 years old. It became irrelevant about 25 years ago, didn't it?
This is why we needed a 50 or 100 billion dollar AI platform to come up with the words Publishers Are Noticing. Meanwhile, Keith... You do link to an interesting piece in O'Reilly by Mike Lukaides on AI and the Kuhnian revolution, the paradigm shifting thing. What does Lukaides tell us about the paradigmatic nature of the AI revolution?
He's adopting Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts as the catalyst for eras, if you will. So scientific revolutions create eras and are catalysts for those eras. And he's making the point that AI is one of those. He also makes the point that in a previous era, the mobile phone was one of those, the smartphone.
Well, the thing is, you only can get value from one of these if you identify it early and then interact with it. So as an observer of the AI paradigm shift, you will be the same person 10 years from now as you are today. But as somebody who understands it early and changes what you do because of it, you can gain value due to it. And so a paradigm shift is a starting point. It's not an end point. And I do think, I mean, if you ask yourself, what am I doing with AI that changes what I do? And if the answer is nothing, then you're missing out because you can't gain value from something you don't use. If you do use it, you still might not gain value, but at least you're in the game.
Yeah, I'm putting myself in the position of a graphic designer, serious one, one with talent, highly paid one. My sense, if I'm not, I have no creative skills on that front, my sense is they might be better off to put all their money on analog and just assume that they'll survive rather than going into... the AI revolution, but I mean, it's a, it's a tough, I mean, photographers, I guess, are caught in the same dilemma in a way.
Um, there's, there's a story this week, Andrew, about, um, the history story, which is basically saying that this site lost 25% of its traffic after deep research came out that was able to...
Yeah. So what's basically happening is that users, not the people with the skill, not the graphic designer, but users are migrating to use tools that previously they may have hired people to do.
Yeah, I mean, I'm my example and I'm not quite as Luddite or as skeptical as sometimes I appear. I had a young woman who was transcribing my Keen on America interviews and it used to cost me, and she was meticulous and excellent, but it used to cost me $50 an interview at least, probably more like 100. And she was reasonable, maybe two or three hours of work. And now I can do it in like two minutes for free, basically. So, I mean, anyone who isn't using it, I mean, I'm not suggesting people shouldn't use it. But again, for mundane tasks like that, rather than creative ones, I'm still not convinced that these things can be particularly creative.
But that's you. You're never convinced until you use something and it does something for you. You don't use images and words that much. But if you did, I guarantee you to start integrating this capability into your workflow because it's cheap and easy and good. And whoever it would be that you were paying in the past, you would no longer pay. There's going to be a lot of that.
Well, I think websites are dead. Certainly website builders are dead. You've suggested that even app developers, you talked a week or two ago about the app you were developing with AI. So I'm not doubting it. I'm just not convinced by this particular image, but maybe I'm wrong here. Meanwhile, when it comes to the real media business, newspapers, Once again, the news isn't particularly good. One piece of news, quote unquote, that you linked to is by John Battelle, the veteran observer of the new industry. And his headline on his search blog is, Google and all of tech to news, shove it. It's like the old message from Gerald Ford to New York City, drop dead. This is a consequence, apparently, of... Google's experiment on the value of European news content. So what does Battelle tell us about Google's lack of interest in the news business?
Consumers' lack of interest. So Google did a test, you know, it's called an A-B test, where they removed European news for some sets of users and they left it in for others and they looked at what happened. And the answer was nothing. In other words, the removal of European news had zero impact on usage and engagement. And this is kind of interesting in the context...
So Europe doesn't want to know about itself, is that?
Words and timings
SoEuropedoesn'twanttoknowaboutitself,isthat?
Keith Teare
Well, I think it's... More the point that people have got ways of keeping in touch with what's going on if they want to. And of course, we know a lot of people don't even care about that. But for those who do, there's lots of ways to keep up. And to be honest, having your newsfeed in Google, which, you know, the European newspapers assume is valuable and that Google should pay for. Google's making the point that they're providing a service to those newspapers because actually there's no value in it.
So coming back to news and creativity, in the O'Reilly piece, will AI be valuable in the creation, not just they talk about music and arts, but also in journalism? Is AI going to become central in journalism, which will mean that the economics of news will dramatically change?
I mean, the broad answer is definitely gonna be yes. AI is gonna pop up as, especially now that you can think of AI in terms of agents with tasks and tools. I experimented this week with an editorial writing agent.
I didn't end up using it, but I could try. The results were very good. By the way, it removes your voice, so you really don't want to use that. But a summarization agent, agent or a snippet creating agent that reduces an article down to a small subset
those are real so yeah those are valuable that's what i use for my keen on is is summaries of the interviews don't have your voice so they may provide a beginning and then you can personalize it but uh a five take up a five takeaway point uh is is really good it really does a wonderful job it would take me hours to do that and it literally takes 15 seconds so so in the software i wrote this week i
produced a feature called show notes and i give the ai my entire newsletter with all the articles and say produce the top talking points the show notes and and it did a really good job of it
Correct. Its only job was to create a graphic for my words.
Words and timings
Correct.Itsonlyjobwastocreateagraphicformywords.
Andrew Keen
Well, that explains it. Meanwhile, we have, according to Nick Denton, one of the great veterans of the tech industry, a man who was successfully sued by one of our... Peter Thiel, was it? Peter Thiel, by one of our billionaire overlords. He had an interesting interview with Andrew Sullivan, our new Chinese overlords. Well worth listening to at least the first 50 minutes, then you won't have to pay for the podcast. What did you make of Denton?
know i i didn't listen to as much as you did so you you can you can tell our listeners what you took away from it i put it in because i know nick denton i was he's been kind of invisible for a few years uh and he suddenly popped up in my feed and he's a colorful character um Both British, these two, by the way, and both gay. So it's like listening to two old British gays talk about China is entertaining, very entertaining.
Yeah, I was struck. I mean, Denton is a very quirky character, very smart guy, but very odd as well. I was struck by how he's basically thrown in all his chips with the Chinese. Doesn't seem to be too bothered with their undermining of of democracy or their rejection of Western democracy, see Singapore as the model for everything, even China. So it's definitely worth listening to.
And intellectually, that is not outside of the box I can get my brain into. I mean, you have to historicize a little bit that democracy is a very recent development of European, mainly European civilization that by the way, has been very provisional. I mean, even Germany and France and Spain and Portugal have all been democratic and not democratic within my lifetime. So, well, Germany not within my lifetime, but the others certainly. And so democracy, accusing China of not being democratic is kind of weird once you have history in your head because it's never been democratic. There wasn't a time when it was. It's probably the most open it's ever been historically today.
Yeah, and you're not going to sucker me into a Chinese conversation, but it's definitely worth listening to. Meanwhile, the article you linked to, which definitely wins the award for the most misleading title, maybe we need AI for this, in the week of more Doge damage, there was a title from Union Square Ventures called The DC Revolution Will Not Be Centralized. So I thought it was going to be all about citizen assemblies or some other kind of Jeffersonian political reform. But it's actually about the inefficiency of constant ACDC conversion. Is that right? Yes. Grace Carney says the weirdest. I mean, the article itself is, I guess, if you're interested in that sort of stuff, interesting. But the title is very misleading.
Yeah. So the electricity grid is run on what's called alternating current, which is a way for a current to be interacting with itself over wires over long distances to keep to not lose energy. But everything in your house uses direct current, which is much more efficient. And in order for the grid to serve your house, there has to be a transitional thing in between. And the point this article makes is that locally produced electricity from solar, for example, can stay on direct current the whole time and is much more efficient. Hence the decentralized part of this, which is a vision where the electrical grid ultimately will be able to be turned off. because you won't need it, because all electricity will be local.
It's interesting if in any underdeveloped part of the world as well, where, you know, the idea that you don't have a national infrastructure of electricity used to be a major problem. Well, with technology, it probably is less of a problem now.
By the way, battery technology is a huge part of that. The problem with solar is you can harvest a lot of it, but you need to be able to store it and transport it.
Well, no, you've got AI on the brain. Maybe we'll... No, we'll just... Solar will have some sort of solar-powered units on our roofs or wherever, maybe on our heads, and that will somehow... give us our battery power? Or manufacture batteries? So we might have to deal with battery companies.
Yeah. Batteries are always going to be physical. That's in the nature of batteries. They're physical. So someone has to make them. So what you're really talking about is efficiency of capture and storage, which keeps getting better. Current solar panels are way better than the early ones. You and me both have solar panels. I don't know if you have a battery. I do. I have two batteries.
interview of the week on Keen on America is with my old friend Parag Khanna. He had a piece out in foreign policy called The Periodic Table of States. He's a Singapore-based geostrategic thinker. He argues that the country's best position to thrive in the 21st century, and neither Denmark nor China, it's Singapore, sorry, not Singapore, although I think Singapore does pretty well. It's Switzerland, Germany, and even the US, so things aren't quite as dire as some people think. What's your take, Keith? And Parag's from India, but India ranks rather poorly. He uses all these different metrics to evaluate the competitiveness of countries. And it's interesting that Switzerland tops the league for not just its economy, but its decentralized political infrastructure.
Well, I... I mean, firstly, I accept the premise that you can look at the world through the prism of nation states and measure the extent to which they are modern, let's say.
That's a reasonable premise. I do think the 21st century isn't going to be very pleasant. due to that way of framing it, because I think nation states, as we're seeing with tariffs and other things, are going to be increasingly competitive due to the fact that there's no single world leader anymore.
Yeah, and you dedicate a whole section in the newsletter to tariffs. You put it under nationalism, so lots of tariff news. Apparently, Trump's coming out on April the 2nd with his Liberation Day. Do you expect it to be a big deal or do you expect him to retreat, as he intends to do?
I think he's philosophically now fully bought into the idea that, and the car tariffs this week were really much more important than the April 2nd, I think. He's fully bought into the idea that by making it super expensive to buy foreign, foreign manufacturers are going to have to build in the US. He's bought into that. So tariffs as a tool of policy to trigger internal investment into the US, He's not going away from that. And Vance is very articulate on the point. And it isn't entirely wrong for a weak nation to do that. There's lots of historical examples of nations that are weak at doing that to good effect. I think we're entering a world of de-globalization and the rise of nationalism. I do think that what I think of as bottoms-up globalization is going to accelerate through the internet, through mobile phones, through AI, through Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, many, many citizens in the world will be able to engage with each other on global platforms that render nation states irrelevant, but not in the realm of economics and politics. In economics and politics, nation states are going to become more and more important and less and less inclined to think about the global impact, only thinking about the local impact.
I think I've heard that one before, but we will come back to it. What's the feeling down in Palo Alto that their Porsches and BMWs are now going to cost another 25%?
You know, it's increasingly dangerous. This is ridiculous, but there's a video this morning of a guy in a SUV pulling out a gun a big gun on a Tesla Cybertruck on a freeway.
No, it was somewhere around Atlanta, I think. But the attacks on Tesla are symptomatic of almost like a post-apocalyptic. But the weird thing is it's the former left acting as the agents of violence. It's kind of interesting to me. It's the most undemocratic, uncivil inability to accept change coming from the left.
I think you can't be woke and fire a gun at a Tesla.
Words and timings
Ithinkyoucan'tbewokeandfireagunataTesla.
Andrew Keen
OK, well, maybe we should be more sympathetic to the woke left. One piece of news, speaking of Tesla and Musk, that beat your deadline, although maybe your AI should be trained to keep up with the news, Keith, is that Elon Musk decided to incorporate X, which used to be Twitter, into XAI in a, on paper at least, interesting financial deal. Is this just...
I haven't digested all of the reasons, motivations and ramifications, but my gut feel is this is a super smart decision. XAI, due to the fact that he spent a lot of money building data centers that produce Grok,
It's better on some things and not on others. But it's valuable. It's worth about $80 billion. And that's a market value based on comps to open AI and others. Twitter was bought for $44 billion. By putting the two together, you end up, you know, being able to write off all the debt in Twitter and reward the Twitter underwriters with stock in the new company that will more than offset their original purchase. So ultimately, everybody wins from this. It did cost Musk billions to get OpenAI to be worth what it's worth. So it wasn't for free, but it's another example of how his risk-taking brain doubles down in order to create new possibilities. If he hadn't built XAI, this couldn't have happened.
Yeah, I mean, I don't mean whether you like him or not. He certainly, there's no doubt he's a risk taker and he's bold and aggressive. It'd be interesting, ultimately, if XAI does turn into the real competition with ChatGPT, OpenAI. I mean, there's no love lost between him and Sam Altman.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's going to be fascinating to watch. And it's for real. I think OpenAI has a massive lead on consumer engagement and revenue, therefore. So what Musk has to try to do is get the 600 million people that use X to start using XAI to be even in the game alongside OpenAI. OpenAI is, you know, easily the most used AI.
Yeah, and you've always been bullish. You've always written off Google's Gemini. You have some time for anthropics clawed, so it'll be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out. No doubt we will talk about that many times in 2025 and onwards. Startup of the week is a very odd thing. company or products called Drone Blaster Fractal Antenna Systems. What does this thing do, Keith?
This is both tech and it's also kind of symptomatic of the time we live through. And ultimately that was the week is documenting what's happening weekly against a broader zeitgeist that we modify over time as things change. But this one fits the zeitgeist, which is tech startups creating military outcomes using hardware. In this case, it's a sound blaster. Basically, sound can be used as a weapon against a drone. So this is fitting in this... This is Star Wars, right?
I'm pretty sure it mainly interferes with systems. So I think the dog might not even notice it unless it's in that range of hearing that dogs have that humans don't.
I assume this is battery-driven, this thing. I don't know. Actually, one of the interesting things out of the Denton thing is he's very sympathetic to some of this new military technology. The one person who came out of the interview he clearly hates for some reason is Kara Swisher. I don't know.
She's become this whiner. She's successful. Why is she a whiner? Actually, I think her peak success was about a year ago before the election. Since the election, she's become this kind of troll to Musk, and she's boring.
Well, poor old Kara, if you're watching, you need to listen to Keith. Don't troll Musk, although you've been trolling him, Keith, for our post of the week. It's from a certain Elon Musk. How many billion followers does he have? Whatever it is, he himself trolls an interview between Jon Stewart and Ezra Klein. What's going on here? Why did you choose this one?
I chose it. I don't know if you noticed it, but this week, Fox News, 10 of his Doge team and this came after that interview and I'd watched the Jon Stewart show this week as well and Jon Stewart's well known as being a man of the left let's say and Ezra Klein is leading the narrative about why the Democrats need to modernize their narrative so I thought it was fascinating that Musk tweeted these two because they're kind of the two most unlikely people for Musk to want to listen to so I played the video and I recommend anyone goes and listens to the video. And it's Ezra Klein explaining to Jon Stewart the layers of bureaucracy and cost in delivering broadband from the $42 billion allocation to rural broadband. Not a single home has been connected from that 42 billion. And he explains how bad the government is in making things happen in great detail that validates a lot of what Doge is thinking and saying. I thought it was fascinating.
Yeah, I haven't seen it, but it's interesting. Although, to be fair to Klein, I mean, he positions himself as a progressive. And the whole point of his new book, I'm not sure if you've read it, Abundance, is to criticize the government, but also say that that is not an excuse for Doge. That's not an excuse to dismantle the government. It's actually... a reason to rethink government regulation and the government is so over-regulated that the only way to achieve reform is by addressing that regulation. He also, in the book, one of the other examples he gives is of the billions of dollars wasted on planning a high-speed train between Los Angeles and California that eventually shriveled down to, I don't know, 50-mile train in the middle of California that no one's going to use.
Kenton also talks about this and that's for him and there is a real argument here and Ezra Klein I think would acknowledge it that's why the Chinese model at the moment is working and the American one isn't because I don't know what the numbers are but the Chinese have you know for every for the billions of dollars invested in 50 miles of train on the west coast the Chinese have laid tens of thousands of miles of high speed train
Yeah, actually, the interview that Fox did with the Doge team, it was interesting. You and I have talked on this show about the framing should be modernizing government to deliver better service at lower cost with less bureaucracy. And up until now, we criticized Musk because he was so focused on cost saving. There was no modernization part to it. It wasn't about improving government. It was cheapening it. Well, in the interview, It was very clear to me that that's changed. There is now a modernization.
I listen to it on. Well, I don't think mantras are appropriate. One must listen weakly. These are human beings with brains and they change. And I listened to it on YouTube, by the way.
Okay, well, for next week, we're going to miss next week because I'm in Europe. In two weeks' time, Keith, your challenge is to come up with a better title than AI gets into publishing. How about that?
Actually, it's a great title. It's just lost on you.
Words and timings
Actually,it'sagreattitle.It'sjustlostonyou.
Andrew Keen
Everything is lost on me, which is no news for people who listen to this show. But, Keith, as always, a pleasure, an honor. We know now that AI is getting into publishing and publishers are noticing. Our viewers and listeners, I hope, are noticing. Have a great couple of weeks, and we will see you in mid-April, where hopefully American democracy will continue to exist.