Podcast: Can AI Save Journalism? (with Peter Stuart)

You know those channels your colleagues keep bragging about, the ones getting all the credit? Yeah, [music] they might be doing squat. Attribution makes every channel look like a hero, even when it's a zero. Incremental tells you who's actually doing the work. [music] It's like a lie detector for your marketing budget. Start using incremental today. Get your demo at incremental.com. That's in n cmnt a l.com. Mention that you came through the mobile dev memo podcast for a special 15% discount [music] for the first 6 months. The problem is that the distinction needs to be drawn between the competence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis.
Welcome to the mobile dev memo podcast. I'm your host Eric Seufort and I'm joined again by Peter Stewart. Peter, welcome back.
Thanks for having me, Eric.
I had you on six months ago in December. We talked about a topic that I find very

fascinating, which is the application of AI to the news and media publishing space. You gave us a really good overview of what was happening in that space. My sense is a lot has changed in that 6 months. I think when we first spoke, you had just launched your publishing platform, Valora. you had maybe encountered a a sort of like a strand of of of negative sentiment about the application of AI to to to publishing. Please introduce yourself to the audience or those who didn't hear the first podcast and then and then walk me through what's changed in the world of publishing in terms of the application of AI and the perceived acceptability of of using AI in the publishing workflow since we last spoke.
Yeah. No, happy to chat about that. Yeah, once again, thanks for having me on. I'm Peter. I'm the co-founder of Aurora along with my technical co-founder Danny Bellian. And I come from a background of having been a cycling journalist since I was 21 years old. Before that as a general journalist and before that a student journalist with Eric and yeah I kind of went

through heydays of magazines and then lastly my last role was as the editor of cycling news which is the world's biggest cycling website. About a year ago, I came up with a kind of loose idea of like developing something that was going to be more AI native as a concept from publishing and sort of in conversation with Danny, who I met at a barbecue. I mean, not spoken to him for like 6 years or something. We got chatting and we decided to like give it a go simultaneously quit our jobs suicide packed and go for launching this platform. As you mentioned, it was originally a cycling website and it is still a cycling website, but our focus was always on developing a platform behind it that would ultimately take a lift out of modern journalism and modern publishing. A large part of that has actually just been the decomposition of the writing process and the publishing process. So Danny having not been in the publishing background looked at what I did day-to-day and sort of looked at where he thought an agent or an AI tool could do the job better or at least augment the job substantially. So where we started with the side publication, we quickly kind of pivoted to producing this as like a public facing platform that other publishers could use. And

yeah, since we chatted, we have, you know, kind of about a dozen different publishers using the platform like on a kind of licensed basis across totally different sectors. And we're just trying to like help more publishers kind of be able to use effectively what is a suite of different AI tools in a very kind of tight orchestration to take the heavy lift out of their publishing workflow. Sometimes that's just basic stuff like tracking news, news visibility. Sometimes that's kind of like uh more involved in terms of CMS uploading, finding images. Sometimes it is extending through to like AI drafting articles and sort of like doing some sort of more automated content. But key to it has always been like the kind of like visibility element, the research element and the verification element and the CMS kind of manual uploading agentic process which have been a help for anyone in publishing regardless of their view on AI writing or AI drafting. And so what's happened in the in the kind of news and media publishing space with respect to you know the the adoption of AI in the six months since we spoke last.
Yes. So I think when we last spoke was

probably when there had been quite a lot of stuff published about the kind of quite slow uptake of AI in journalism across the UK. Certainly you know I think the Reuters had a stat that about 20% of journalists had never used an AI tool in any journalistic task at all. and you know only sort of about a quarter were using it on daily basis which large part of that was just AI transcription tools like user and things since then there's been sort of like some more public kind of embracing of AI tools like you know you have a large you know quite highrofile partnership between News UK and symbolic which is an AI kind of editorial suite and outside of the UK we've certainly had other countries that have had more kind of fundamental AI infrastructure become part of their workflow with kind of multiple agent generated news with sort almost effectively totally automated local news processes or news production. But in the UK, I think probably as with the US, a lot of the kind of development's been slightly hamstrung by a lot of sort of quite high-profile kind of embarrassing cases of, you know, AI being misused or like causing editorial

errors. And that's where kind of most the news has hovered. So I think most AI use is still quite discreet. And speaking to trainers in the AI space, like while I think more companies are looking at ways to use AI, most companies are still quite early in their process of like currently still getting to terms with like a clawed kind of subscription and claude co-work tools and Gemini kind of basic chat bots. We haven't seen like the kind of full agentic process go into many publications and certainly not in a public way. You know, I think for the most part, any major news publication now has an LLM generated summary at the top. And, you know, I don't think readers, consumers, you know, object to that. I think, in fact, I think people probably find it really helpful. I started including that in the posts I send by email just because I think it's important for people to get a sense of like what this thousand words is about before they kind of commit to it, right? And so if you just kind of read a two-s sentence summary that I think is pretty obviously generated by ALM, maybe it gives you a sense of whether this is worth your time

or not. And I think people find that helpful. But where's that boundary, right? Like where does it go from like this is a helpful perk that you're providing to me versus like, oh, you've deceived me and you're making me read slop. Like where do you draw the line? a summary. I think if we if we just, you know, maybe just kind of accept that everyone views that as a useful tool and and and that's like an acceptable use case to like writing the full article with an LLM probably wouldn't be seen in the same in the same light. Where's the line? Like, you know, if I had whole paragraphs that were LM generated or like where where do you think you would draw a line there on on just on the output side of things? I think what you see with lots of publications is they have sort of developed language that will state you know maybe if an AI is used to create a substantial part of the article we will make it transparent and that's kind of the language you might see with say like the Guardian or the BBC. I think the BBC might specifically say that writing is not allowed or research is not allowed with AI tools basically to be even more

clear, but I think there's quite like a a furry line when you say like AI is used for any part of the writing process versus AI is like maybe generating articles quasi autonomously. To my mind, it gets like super cynical and kind of a bit distasteful when something is positioned as say commentary or opinion and it's clearly AI generated because I think that's when you feel as a reader like well have you really like articulated this yourself or is is it just the result of two prompts or even one prompt be like you know write me a hot take. I think it's really important to consider how that's different to say like something that might be like a financial write up of a quarterly report. And at that point, you're like, well, really all you're trying to do is you might have a huge document that's emailed to you in press release form or an SEC filing and you're just trying to delineate the key information for your audience. And at that point I'd say well if you have a robust pipeline in place and this is my view and you have verification in place and the information is correct it doesn't really make a difference in my perspective if that's AI written or human written from

scratch because the the core thing is it's anformational journey for the reader and if they've sort of found that that was been fulfilled appropriately then I think AI use or no AI use isn't really a problem. I think generally like the amount of AI written content on the internet is actually far far more than most people appreciate. Like even people like the Guardian, prestigious publications, they get caught out with like you know Pangum type like screenshots saying you know your sports writers have been using you know 100% AI generated content for the last like six columns they've published and they haven't often been able to rebuff that in a very efficient or like kind of robust way because most publications don't have control over what the every single writer is doing all the time and there's always the argument oh the AI detector is not 100% you know reliable or what have you. So it's not like a a fair jury in terms of like the substrate that sits below kind of substrate probably the wrong word in terms of layer that sits below like the nationals and the prestigious titles. I'd say AI generated copy is already effect to be like ubiquitous like and you're thinking about all the trade magazines all the B2P publications all the kind of

individual site owners that exist there. A lot of these people are you know financially sensible and responsible for their output and their income and they're naturally going to look at what is the most efficient way to get content out to a level which their audience expects. There's also like you know I think I never expected like started working in this field but the amount of offshoring that's kind of a combination of offshoring and AI use is also super super common across lots and lots of sectors. You might have financial or like showbiz or you know sporting titles that have teams in the Philippines or India or somewhere that are using kind of chat to mass produce content. A lot of this gets penalized by Google from time to time but lots of it doesn't if the domain is established and has lots of authority. So yeah the actual broader ecosystem of how AI is used I think is has changed substantially. My expectation now with most publications when I see content definitely if it's a if it has regular output quite commodity content is that AI has played a part in the creation of lots of the copy whether that's obviously detectable is probably more of a technical question than it is ethical cuz you know people that use AI a lot are probably getting better and better at disguising the kind of obvious

AISM and that kind of becomes to me the most insulting bit when someone's not even tried to cover up the fact that it's like [laughter] that's not weakness it's you know fragility or something and it's like come on this is freaking obviously Jack GPT talking get rid of that but so you kind of end up more resentful of the person's like technical gap and not thinking like why didn't you cover this up all that say now I don't I'm not necessarily promoting this is like a good outcome like the machine written kind of like ecosystem of publishing is kind of scary in a way but we have to be honest that people aren't going to make life difficult for themselves if you have basically the world's most efficient intern sitting right next to you willing to do all your writing for free you're not going to labor through yourself and do it you know if if you've got a paid you know a mortgage to pay and you're conscious of hits and time and whatnot so I think in the broadest term that has changed quite a lot across the whole ecosystem of publishing. You know, where that sits for like big publishers, I'm not sure. But truth be told, you know, while I was saying before that, you know, they've got AI tools in place and are trying to work on that. What I hear from like people that are trainers in the space is that a lot of them because they've had such hostility and such fear amongst the

staff, they still are maybe like a year, two years behind a lot of what other sectors might be at. So they they're now currently getting into like using Claude Co-work or setting up like you know an agent or something but they're not quite where other you know industries may be you were saying you know even say in marketing I think a lot of marketing teams have got kind of quite efficient kind of like content automation pipelines in place already it's kind of maybe a bit of a given and you know increasingly even from the SEO teams that used to be very anti-AII they'll accept the assumption that AI has played quite a big part in writing because it's just naturally efficient. Yeah, I mean I think it's a great point. Where does the audience delineate like acceptable use is probably what ultimately is going to define what acceptable use is and not just these kind of like legacy media organizations trying to maintain like the status quo because it's just like you said I mean it's just not going to be economical but like I think cuz I was writing to this company called Bending Spoons filed this I filed for an IPO yesterday and so I was writing up the F1 which is like the foreign equivalent of an S1. their their filing document and

like you know the historically I would have just read that whole thing and it'd be like it's 100 pages and like okay that's going to take two hours but now I just feed it to chatbt and I have a spec I have a list of questions and and and you know tell me where I can find this information and but you know it also if it's giving me just some call it a two sentence paragraph that summarizes the growth there's no discernable difference between what I would have written and what it wrote it's just a bunch numbers concatenated with like ands and commas. Like it's it's really there's there's no you wouldn't be able to tell and like said for that purpose it's like okay if I copy I don't remember if I did I try I try not to have any anything make it into my articles that is purely machine written but like if I copied and pasted that I I don't think it's it's not a violation of trust on the part of the reader. Now that's not analysis. That's just reporting numbers, right? Reporting metrics, right? But how what have you heard like what's what is the range of attitudes across big media organizations? Does it tend to map by

size? Like BBC says absolutely not and then some small blog says we just don't care. Like what what is what's what is the range of of attitudes and how does that map to like the the size or the prestige or the you know the age of the organization? I think really big organizations haven't changed particularly quickly and that's probably not to do with ethics as much as to do with just like the inertia of a very large business and the way it operates like you know you have BBC has thousands and thousands of journalists you know the times has hundreds those people have their own workflows on their own desks and telling them to switch to something else is going to be really hard at the best of times you know and I think quite commonly you know these big organizations might roll out a Gemini you know license and then uptake is absolutely tiny
I'm actually headed there's a conference next week from publishing across Europe and it'll be interesting to see there more direct on the ground information but I think you have a scene where like in the Nordic countries or Scandinavia or even kind of Belgium you have much more embracing of like AI tools and AI

like agentic processes like media use which is like a big publisher that owns like 100 different publications including nationals they have a whole like agentic news workflow that they're very open about like I don't know what the by lines look like on that I don't know whether it is like sort of you know subsequently you know like attached to someone where it's transparently kind of machine written. I think generally like places in the UK, you know, that that do have started to go down the kind of AI drafting route are probably not super vocal about it. And I think that problem with that is that I think trust kind of falls through the floor when someone knows something is AI written. And I think I think the assumption is that much like I said at the beginning that if someone's using AI, it's total laziness play. It's not to do with actually trying to improve the content or be more efficient. And there's lots of you know like you know studies and this that trust of AI media is like super low but worth qualifying that stuff that trust of media generally is also actually super low. So people are naturally not going to trust AI in me if they don't trust media anyway. So I think there's a big range of like kind of full kind of like manual written kind of policies that will be very carefully adhered to and then people that are

experimenting a bit more boldly. A lot of it's going to be like on a very basic level a kind of economic cost per article thesis like if you have the times the Sunday Times the Economist you know they don't publish a huge amount of articles for the staff they have you know they've got like a very expensive subscription base their readers probably expect a large investment a writer might as always spent one or two days maybe more writing an article by comparison you might have digital writers at lots of publications that might have to do 10 plus stories a day and there at that point you're like well if if the story was going to commodity content anyway. It doesn't really change anything if it's machine written. And so it's not surprising that a lot of those titles will flip to a machine written kind of model. But I'd expect that, you know, the more prestigious titles, the FTS, the Times, the BBC will continue to sort of have like a very rigorous copy as human written. Whether that actually changes anything, you know, or it actually makes the read experience better for the reader, I kind of question. And you know some of these people like the FT like it certainly has strict policies. They have actually offered like totally AI generated

content as a service that's like newscast that was done a few years ago using like a a third party AI kind of newswire service called Noah wire. Yeah I don't think that's ever made it to like consumer readers but it was a visaged just like a B2B service. I'm getting a lot of that stuff like it probably has been experimented with quite early when the models were still not really quite up to it but I think there's definitely been a C change like you know when you have like Opus 4.6 six probably the moment I'd say that stuff jumped forward quite dramatically in terms of capability with writing and 4.8 a like the actual models now are like super capable and now it's not a question of like quality I don't think on the writing front it's really just about kind of ethics and accountability plenty of mobile growth strategies [music] are still built on broken journeys and incomplete data and it's costing brands [music] big time branch fixes that it's your AI powered MMP that unifies your links measurement and user experience across every channel to successfully [music] acquire retain ain and engage your app users without

wasting spend. Learn more at branch.io. And while you're there, check out Branch's AI search and discovery report covering insights [music] from more than 300 marketing, growth, and digital leaders on how they're responding to the rise of AI search. I want to move on from the output part of the discussion because I think it's it's a more superficial topic within this conversation, but how do you view that like accountability piece? Because I mean my sense is like you could view the brand or just the association of the publication with you know rigorous journalism, exhaustive factchecking, unbiasedness. You could view that that kind of brand association as a license to embrace this because it's like you you sort of give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll embrace it responsibly, right? And so it's actually interesting that you said that the northern European countries are

embracing you know the use of AI in in in news and because they tend to be I think a little bit more restrictive with anything that has to do with like labor and and workers rights and stuff. But if if you have this this reputation, if you're the Walter Kronhite, you know, sort of halo effect, then you'd think that readers might give them more leeway to introduce this because it's, well, I I I I trust that they're using this, but they're also validating it, verifying it. They're using it in ways that are aligned with their sort of brand image, and and so I'm I'm I'm going to accept it from them, but like from another publication, I might not just because they don't have that same level of trust. Is that do you think that's that's roughly right a good way to look at it?
Yeah. To be honest, I think my view on this stuff is that I think the level of trust is very high with those brands. Also, the level of skepticism like now I don't know if you've noticed but like if if there's like a commonly shared LinkedIn post about like some headline on a newspaper being like all wrong or like you know some it's always like look AI messed up again. It's like well probably not actually you know if if someone miswrote a headline but I don't

think AI would do that. It's quite good at doing that sort of stuff. Probably just some sub editor that wasn't paying attention. You get the odd like end of a newspaper newspaper india that had like you know for the next question and then let me know if I can help out by putting this in an email.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that that stuff happens quite a lot. And then you have like more highprofile like mess ups like you had the kind of New York Times when they had an AI generated kind of summary was like was attributed as a quote or you had a book review plagiarized from the Guardian and you had Rs Technica had that huge issue with like AI generated quotes as well. There was a whole like list of of issues and I think when what ultimately in my view happens is titles don't have a very clear or like sensible AI policy. Some individuals in that business use AI tools in a very like untechical unwise way. They have a big scandal and then they totally freeze up and like we don't use AI at all. It's all human stuff and it's kind of like that recoiling back just because that fear of like trust is like so strong. My view of the stuff has always been that I think if you have super robust AI policies that involve actual AI use and really clear

traceability and that's what I don't think there is a lot of kind of like processes in place where you have okay here's our research agent here's where that's checked by a human here's where a draft might be checked by a human here's where an edit is checked by a human here's where an edit is completed by human here's a here's like you know an engram comparison of the edit versus the draft and you can totally see how much has been changed by the person I think that would be like a state where you think okay well seems like it's a robust auditable kind of process and I think I don't know where where they're at with it but the EU has a transparency act for AI generated content I think will come into effect in August I haven't checked on it recently but for that they actually offer like an an exemption of news publishers that have very clear auditing in place so if they're saying you know we clearly see who set the software to be written which research tool was used you don't have to disclose and say this is a generated content how that law is going to work in effect I have no idea because you know how you going to enforce that across the whole of news media so yeah I In answer to your question, I think there's like probably a bit of a technical gap where the subtitles haven't begun aggressively working on an AI kind of like infrastructure that makes sense for

them. And also they're faced with so much audience hostility, people just hunting down some sort of a a scandal to set them up to be like, hey, look, the media got it wrong and you know, they're using AI for for like for lazy purposes. And you know alongside that you have some super kind of like ill-advised projects where you know I think this one publisher in the US had sort of said that they have the right publish articles that are generated with writers by lines with or without their consent and that's just kind of crazy management decision where it is totally like obviously going to have a big backlash. I think generally like trust is a complex issue and I think trust of AI being used well will be super low for brands where there's already a massive public skepticism anyway which typically is the bigger brands that you know are more public
right yeah yeah I think about the use of gro on on Twitter like for instance right like so it feels like a very effective and let let me know if you see this other differently but like it's it feels like a very effective way of just combating misinformation because you just okay well I'm going to use the LLM which is Yeah. Also has, you know, kind of tool access and can do searches in

real time and it just validate what people are saying. And like, yeah, there's a lot more AI slop on on Twitter now, but like you but you can also use the integrated LLM, which is Grock, to to validate what people are saying and if they're just spouting nonsense and like that feels like a, you know, so so right there you can kind of see the the pros and the cons like, well, okay, there's a lot of AI slop. someone just went to chat GBT and asked for whatever 300 words on some topic and it it's just it's it's just poorly written and not engaging pros, right? But but at the same time, like the benefit of applying LLM in this environment is I could just fact check stuff almost in real time and call people out and utterly neutralize what they're trying to do, which is spread information because you could just see the you see the Grock response and then someone attaches a community note. And I think that actually is like a really ingenious technique for slowing the spread of of just false information. So, so like there's right there it's visible right on Twitter of the dual use, right? Or like the sort of like

dual impact.
Yeah, I think that's really I actually think about that all the time. No joke. It's funny you say that because I was actually talking to my partner about it today. Yeah. You know, a really interesting specific example of that in action in real time was about two weeks ago. There was an article published across the international media which is about these Thai police officers that had had apparently like gone in drag to bust a drug rink. And it was back in this picture of them all in drag at the police station, you know, having like busted loads of of like seized loads of drugs. And it was like probably three or four days of it running until eventually it came out the image they generated and you everyone had to like issue kind of corrections. The things that stunned me about that story is that I looked at it and it wasn't actually picked up in the UK press at all that this was the case. But I took the Telegraph's picture that was on their actual website,
ran it through synth ID and synth ID, you know, Gemini's inbuilt AI detection tool. Somebody flagged that it was it was an AI generated image based on the synth ID pattern and you're like, well, that that's totally bewildering that nobody throughout this whole news cycle thought to just put it into Gemini to be like, hey, is this this AI? That tool is

free, you know, anyone can do that. And lots of AI generated content, you know, won't have the synth ID because it might be done from other AI image generation tools, but the most common one is is Gemini or Chat GBT and chat also now has synth ID in it.
Right. Right.
You're like, you could easily use AI to actually combat misinformation, but there's not necessarily the processes in place to do that. That's that's one element I think is really interesting that people sort of think AI disinformation, but actually AI also is a solution to that. Even that AI kind of disseminated disinformation. And then I think the point about like AI tools like I kind of I think being used to combat disinformation is super interesting because while we one hand talk about like the lack of trust and I generated content. Yeah. I constantly see as you say like grock is true on Twitter and you know I think people you know go to chat check everything like you know I check don't you know people are going to pile on but I check medical stuff on chat and like you know I feel confident to be like well I'm an intelligent human on top of this so if it says you know go to hospital I probably need to use that information in relevance to like what I know about the world to be like okay

that's fair advice versus on Google you know typically medical stuff is just kind of terrifying because you're like well here's a an info page about you know having some awful terminal disease that might have the symptom So yeah, I think AI is super effective actually like providing information and like being grounded and also weirdly trusted by seemingly all sides because everyone from all spectrum seems to be like I don't think they at you know the Guardian someone who's like a you know Republican wouldn't be like at Guardian is this story true they just inately just trusted right
but that's [laughter] but in a way that I don't understand everyone seems to just align themselves to believing what like an AI tool will say and my best guess is that there's no like implicit agenda within an AI tool that's just existing to kind of like react to the questions you provide it. So you don't feel like it's trying to imprint on you and but it might be like they you know I'm sure there's lots of studies into the kind of like right or leftwing like traces within answers and stuff or you know but ultimately people seem to just be happy that it's responding to the way they address it which probably will you know mold to

whatever kind of political ideology you have or maybe typically I think it does tend to mediate against any extreme like if you're very leftwing person you know may push you more right more center you know and the same with rightwing but generally I think it engages you on your level which I think is why people seem to have this trust that they this engage in dialogue in a way that doesn't work with the wider kind of news media where I think you constantly really have to align yourself to one political way of thinking to agree with one publication's output and that's probably just to do with the fact that ultimately and this is me getting a bit philosophical so excuse me a second but ultimately the news news is ambient and huge it's all happening all the time and definitely now more than ever newspapers report on what Donald Trump said on Truth Social and that will be the main component of a story they don't need to spend as much time you know being at a press conference to get a quote stuff is just happening all around us. So newspapers increasingly have to choose their segment of reality along a certain pmic of the way they want to communicate that. And I think in the world of AI increasingly I think firstly platforms are already kind of distributing that information

naturally in a way that is kind of suited to its audience like Tik Tok or Instagram may serve reals that provide news to people in a way that's very different to historic news production. But I think AI tools for a layer on top of that where they can totally interpret kind of everything that's going on and produce a really useful answer and explain it to somebody that's quite like reassuring in real time. So I think those things just make an AI tool quite trustworthy for the general population. I think that's more and more the case. But the problem is you know when you think about it on a sort of you know theoretical level if people using an AI tool to validate a journalist perspective the kind of game is totally inverted because the person that's trusted to be the kind of source of information is now being corrected by the AI tool which is kind of madness. So yeah that's kind of my take on that. A long answer apologies. Well, yeah. I guess I guess my my point was more just is this just allows us to have a better sense of like whether we can trust the underlying kind of call it factual scaffolding of things that are reported, right? Like like to your point like I I I you know you've got to you got to

trust that the the tool itself is unbiased, right? So like you know no one's going to at Guardian or like you know at Teen Vogue. Is it true that I don't know take your pick, but like if it was trained on Teen Vogue's corpus, I I don't know that I would consider that to be an unbiased fact checker, but assuming you do trust it, like if I'm seeing, right, you know, like I could it's much easier to do factecking now. I don't have to go to like a team of people that are going to comb over each sentence and like what and go search where because a lot of cases like there might not be a discrete source of like to validate some piece of information. But if I'm seeing something that's not now, I'm not not talking about opinion pieces, but if I'm just seeing something that's written as news, I'm assuming that if I can assume now that they used an LLM based fact checker to to validate what was written, it's it's probably trustworthy or at least it at least it hues to the preponderance of of information that exists on that topic, right? Like and and so that that should make me maybe give me more trust in in

the news that I read, right? And if I'm assuming that these tools are applied to the output, not not generated the output, but it's just applied to it as some sort of filter and there's just more accessibility of fact-checking, then maybe I have a better sense of trust for everything that I read going from the biggest publication down to someone's substack. Yeah, that's actually I think I was thinking about that today and I think there's a sense that like okay you got AI not trustworthy human trustworthy but obviously people are not trustworthy like you know you have to assume that an editor and my time as an editor like the amount of copy that came across my desk like was huge. I didn't have time to like check, okay, let me go and Google that this city actually is in Italy or whatever. Like I'd just be like, cool. Well, that looks fine. Journalists presume you know what they're talking about, so like no spelling mistakes. Let's go. Don't quote me on that. You know, you know, obviously check the stuff that's high stakes, but like you know, you don't have like a kind of constant like rolling fact checker, right?
But as technology changes, I think in most sectors, you have an expectation that there's like if a tool is available and it's capable, there begins to become a dynamic where not using it becomes the

negligent thing. like you know if it refused to use the CT scanner or didn't do X-rays like no I just I just don't believe in that I'm an old school you know orthopedic surgeon they' be like know what like use the freaking technology otherwise that if something goes wrong then that's that's suddenly like a a culpability issue for you and I feel like it's very feasible that that if it's not already the case that could become the case with sort of like journalistic publishing work cuz you know you've got like you know a grounded search on Google Gemini pro or something like you know just giving examples one that we use for one step of our verification it is incredibly capable able at returning information and not just information that is like based on training data. it will find, you know, search based validated information in real time and be like, okay, this 100% is true based on this source or this actual primary evidence based on, you know, what someone said on on X or something. And like there are gaps there and you sometimes have hallucinations kind of cascade through news media. But, you know, even then there's points where you could be like, well, then develop an anti-h hallucination validator to go find the original source. And there's like steps that you're like you can actually kind of introduce tiers of validation and verification that would

be totally impossible for any sort of news team unless they had a crazy budget of hundreds and hundreds of heads. So in that sense I feel that yeah AI can and will ultimately make stuff like a higher bar of like verification and truth when it's like used in a sort of you know intelligent and like well deployed way
right and and and to your point you might even want to disclose the fact that you didn't use it right and again like not you know the Teen Vogue fact checker LLM
they're coming for you that legal team is super digitist [laughter] how dare you defend team
or or you know what the the Breitbart at Breitbart LLM fact checker. But like if you didn't use any sort of LM based factecking, you might want to disclose that like no LLM was used to fact check this article. Then I would probably be less I I I would be I would be more skeptical of what was written there. Like that that it wasn't at least validated against, you know, some the common terminology or like common referenced metrics if it was using some

source that was seen to be biased in some way and that wasn't flagged like that. To me, I would want to know that like because I I just assume now and maybe it's it's an invalid assumption, but I assume that anything I'm reading on the internet has at least gone through a pass, right? Like like I I do it like check give me spell check and grammar check at at a minimum. But like just to and so like again I I just do think that the widespread availability of these tools should fortify a lot of the stuff that we read. And because you know what I do is I've got a one of my prompts that I take an article through before I especially if it's like a more controversial topic. I re I read this adversarially. Tell me the top five criticisms that someone would have against this if they were very hostile to the ideas that I'm I'm articulating here. And like that's really helpful because it like it helps to maybe soften some of the edges or like take to sort of like deflate some of the the more tendentious, you know, things and like just make it less likely that someone's going to explode when they read it. And I I would imagine that you just see that effect. And so like I don't think that

that's highlighted as a benefit like the widespread availability because again people focus on the output but if you focus on just these tools as a layer that the human written output passes through to improve them I don't think anybody could argue that that is a benefit.
Yeah. Actually it's funny because we the Laura platform like you know we have like a whole pipeline of you know from like article idea to verified you know final like CMS ready content but we have actually developed a whole separate pathway which is like manual writing and in that pathway you just write into our platform but as you go you can select text and you can say challenge this or find a new angle or fact check it and it does that against research document that exists against the topic and that has been super interesting because I'm like I don't think at any point you can you have an objection to that in terms of like AI interfering with the process cuz you know you can take or leave the advice you can be like cool that was your perspective I'm going to ignore that but typically it's super effective at being like you know you only have your own perspective in writing it is effectively someone else like a live real-time editor saying you know that's

that doesn't really make sense does it or like you know don't you think that people are going to question whether that's you know like a valid argument in light of this and I find that's really super helpful as I'm writing stuff like you know more like analysis type stuff to be like okay highlight this challenge this angle and I feel like that this could become the standard way to ultimately see writing reach a new level of of quality and I think that people might be squirming and hearing that but I think we think about AI tools like helping coding or whatever like claude code or coding agents that really accelerate and in a way that you know most people no longer have an objection to no one saying oh claw code just creates slop it's like most of the internet now is like being built with cla code you know like and then and I think writing could be the same I think as the technology develops I think we'll see tools that actually augment writing in a really positive way and actually lead to writing better because you're giving people that might not have had the experience of having like an editor or like someone else's feedback suddenly having an LLM tool to say this could be a bit better. Have you thought that about that? And you know most seasoned writers have had that in human form. They've had someone go through and say you know like you need to tighten up your writing. You need to knock the edges off this and and that's like a

really key part I think of maturing as a writer and I don't know many people that wouldn't have had that at some point in their careers that have suddenly gone on to be like you know very very accomplished or you know technically strong writers. So I think that's a real positive. Obviously the flip side is that you know when one editor and this is getting a bit when one editor is very kind of like edit heavy at a title everyone's content tends to conform to that person's writing and I think the same thing can happen with chat GBT if the whole world is using chat GBT as a de facto editor then everyone's writing will naturally sort of trend towards what chat GPT inherently thinks is good but you know I think then that there are flaws there you know there there risks but I think there's still a lot of scope for originality and you know for just treating an LLM as a as like a really healthy adversarial or like supporting writing assistant or co-writing.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And I'm not talking about like give me advice on the pros. I'm talking about like fact check this and and give, you know, give me a sense of like what the holes are in it. Mobile game developers no longer need to pay up to 30% in major [music] app store

fees. With Exolo Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%. And keep players engaged with bundles, [music] rewards, and analytics. Start today at exola.com. That's xsol.com or use the link in the episode show notes. I want to talk about the Valora platform because I think that to me like what you've built is I think like if you just if you just kind of like had a oneliner like a an elevator pitch for the for the platform like a kind of layman would probably say oh you're going to help people you're going to contribute to more AI output on the internet and like that's that's absolutely not what the platform is. I mean you know you gave me access and I've used it. I want to talk about that because I think what I'm impressed by with with the velour is the capabilities with respect to you know finding processing classifying sorting ranking news and ideas as a tool right and and that to me is what an LLM is

truly good at LLM does next token prediction and it it gener it's generative it generates text but I think a lot of the sort of a misunderstood value is just doing all those things classifying you know ranking sorting like you know summarizing that kind of stuff is the real value to me and and talk to me about how you how the velour platform is used as a publishing tool because I think that's the piece that I think people don't appreciate about the power of AI in publishing and we we talked about one piece just now is like facteing right but talk to me about the whole suite like the whole sort of like end to end use case of this stuff that has nothing to do with generating text.
Yeah. No definitely well I think you have to accept that like ultimately whenever you think about AI tools like you can take objections to them and say you know I don't like the idea of this. I don't, you know, think it's it's trustworthy for writing copy, which is all totally fine, but there's some things you can't debate an AI tool is better at. And one of those things is certainly taking a huge amount of information and quickly processing it and understanding it in a very like topline way. So you know news discovery

in terms of like signals and an understanding of what is interesting to your audience. You can ingest like a thousand sources every hour and an AI typically a person might scroll their competitors and their B might look at social post but they might have you know 30 signals or or sources. You know an AI can look at thousands and it will sort in a you know intelligent way this is what is relevant to you at this particular moment. These are the most kind of highinterest topics for you to pursue as a starting point. In my mind, there's just no competition there. Like, you know, there's a value in someone looking through the whole kind of news of the picture, but it's you can't possibly do it as well as an AI tool. Now, another another element you can't do as well or perhaps like you need to do in sort of symfony is kind of research. And I think like definitely there's kind of like there's value in doing your own research, but as you said, you can't look through like dozens and dozens of of sources, hundreds of pages of PDFs in 5 minutes. Like, it's not something that a human being is able to do. if you had enough time and resource maybe but you know ultimately there's a limitation that you simply

cannot scope this much information you cannot draw so much research together you can't understand the picture widely like that so that is something that I think an AI tool again is fundamentally better at in symphony of the person then like at the other end the pure manual processes so well yeah finding an image that's relevant that's like a long personal you know like train time thing populating fields in a CMS that is a very laborious kind of menial task that people historically done. CMSs have been built because people have to do them have to populate these fields. They have to say here's a title field. Here's a subhead field. When you really think about it, that doesn't really need to have any human interface. If an agent or any talk can understand that that's where that copy needs to go. We only created a complex infrastructure to enable someone to put it there because there's no other way of taking copy from here and putting it there. Like when an AI can do it, you just need to abstract that step entirely away from the person looking at it or doing it. similar like SEO or alt text. It's all just like kind of menial work that people end up having to do. And that final level just like creating a validation there that's

really really robust on top of human validation and then actually creating distributions. So say like creating publishing a piece but then creating social assets that accompany it, creating like suggestions for social copy, stuff like that. This is all stuff that takes like a long time. But none very few of those steps really add anything at all to the creative process that people actually value in journalism or piece of writing. It's just like a lot of unnecessary kind of surrounding labor and noise within that in the central part of the platform. We do have like drafting but that's totally down to an editor editorial team's discretion whether they decide to do something manually by by like you know using an AI augmented writing tool like where you know that will challenge or like make suggest angles or they just ask for a first run draft. Within that first run draft we also have like a kind of grill me phase. So it'll be like the AI tool will come back and be like what are you thinking for this story? What's your actual angle? what are you trying to focus on? There's this bit that was in the interview. There's this bit that's in the PDF document. What's actually important to you? And it will go through like seven or eight steps of that. And then it will then kind of go away to form a more cohesive brief that you can

look through and then it will go through to a draft. And at that point, some of that content that I've gone through has been like kind of heartbreaking cuz I've like done that for a feature. I like okay, I'll try this like real me process and I'll use all this information. I look at the final version. I'm like, wow, I don't really know what I can do here. Cuz you know, it's just like it took a long time to prompt it. maybe 20, 30 minutes of like putting information, but when it came out, it was like exactly what I'd expect, but in a way that would super neatly stitch together and then it's like I can change a bit of wording here or there, but I'm not really adding anything. It's just customizing. But, you know, when you've added that level of information, the draft you'll get back is like super high quality. And that's probably what gets lost in the kind of like oneshot slop kind of like AI writing world where you've got someone just being like boom here's here's a LinkedIn post that says nothing and means nothing versus like here's a lot of information here's a lot of context and there's like a kind of iterative writing process. So yeah, we kind of do all that and we do that for multiple types of content like news or features and the idea is that you kind of give time back to the journalist to do something interesting and that's kind of the very the key core principle like

what is interesting is not whether you spent like you know 25 minutes writing a quarterly financial report or 2 hours in the morning looking through a thousand sources to find out what was the most interesting bit of information in the morning in the kind of like know like Canadian fishing beat. But I think there's like that stuff that doesn't really add. But that's interesting is going out into the world, speaking to people, actually looking at a whole topic and being I think the most interesting angle here is this from my lived experience and actually adding something human to it. And I think we often think okay well the human bits in the writing but like if if it's totally formulaic programmatic writing anyway, someone isn't really adding their perspective. It's just a drain on time. So we have to be realistic about like is that something someone should be doing? And I think ultimately that stuff is that stuff people will be doing less in the future whether that's because of AI or whether because that content just becomes less valuable because it didn't really take any effort to create. It's not scarce in any way. That's the kind of interesting question that I think is going to surface in the next few years. But I think journalism will have to get to a point where people do more interesting things with their time. They actually find, you know, interesting stories. They have interesting conversations. They form interesting perspectives. And without that, I think

there's no real like moat against, you know, someone just churning out absolutely tons of content at scale, you know, using an AI tool without kind of like any sort of high benchmark of, you know, like verification interest or, you know, journalistic ethics in it.
Yeah. And I think that's something that, you know, maybe just people that have never kind of written as a professional activity just just miss how how much reading is involved in publishing something. Like there's a lot of times you know like just now I'm writing about Apple's new foundation models framework and like I had to read two technical papers just now like this morning like instead like this blog post will be 800 words but like it took me you know it takes 45 minutes to and and to not read a a technical paper takes a very long time to read but like just to just kind of scan it and get the big picture idea it's very very very timeconuming and you know with a technical paper I don't really trust just dropping in a chatb but like there's a lot of stuff like like an earnings report. Like I I yeah, I could spend 45 minutes reading this

whole thing word for word. I could drop it in chatbt and say I'm looking for these pieces of information. Like tell me where to find them and give me three anchor words that I could search for to go exactly to that point and then skip all the questions that I don't care about. And it's just so much more efficient. and maybe I get to write two earnings analysis in a night instead of just one because I didn't have to read both earnings call transcripts word for word and like that's not AI generated output. There's nothing to do with actually generating the words. is more about inform me and give me the latest information as fast as possible so that then I can ingest that and then write my analysis, right? like that that that truly and then you know find me new information that could add more context to my my understanding of this topic like that that is really underappreciated because like how do I just unknown unknowns like where do I even go to look if there's a tool that can that's just been you know knows it's got a huge bank of of resources that I

can scan basically every 10 minutes to find stuff that's relevant to me that's just helpful that's all that doesn't generate the output it it it makes the writing process more efficient and that really I think is the true advantage of using these tools, right?
Yeah. And that's it. And I to like visualize that a bit more clearly that for us that's like we have in the platform we have sort of an RSS and a web kind of scraping section. We have a social media section. We have a YouTube section and that stuff's all this pulled like kind of like super frequently, you know. So some stuff might originate from, you know, international press or a different press from a different sector might might originate from competitor, but a lot of it's just from social media that's happening, you know, like YouTube transcripts, like finding a very specific part of a long podcast. that's actually really newsworthy or an interesting starting point. And yeah, that that's stuff that is just like genuinely impossible to to do in like a personal level. But what's cool about the platform is that the journalist decides what the sources are. It's not just saying, "Hey, HD, find this interesting story. You're in charge of saying, I know, I think these international outlets are really important. I'm going to overindex on them. I think these social accounts, the ones I really want to follow. These are

the YouTube channels I want you to look at every single day and tell me what's coming up there." And that's where you get a bit more like originality and curation kind of put back into the process compared to like, you know, just a sort of a general sort of sweep of saying, "Claude, tell me what's interesting."
All right. I I know we're out of time. Take this moment to promote the velour platform. How can people test it out? How can they how can they add it to their writing workflow?
Yeah. So, we're just velour, vlog, and you can just come and add me on LinkedIn, ask to use the platform. We let people use it. We're still kind of in the early phase. We want people to use it and feedback and tell us what they like or hate or think is really good. So yeah, just reach out and I'm happy to do demos and we're also happy to like work with people on their specific use cases cuz we're just super fascinated in how this scales out to someone working in say, you know, fishing or someone working in bird watching or someone working in super specific insurance financial stuff. And so far we've found that it's actually able to help people in almost all cases because some of these tools just are kind of totally title or sector agnostic, which is really fun. So yeah, reach out to me and please don't

hesitate. I'm friendly and I'm always happy to have a chat and even if you don't want to use the platform to have a chat about AI, my favorite topic and journalism. So yeah, don't be a stranger. Thanks, Peter.