Ratliff's method involves creating real-world experiments, like an AI-run company, to experience and report on technology's effects, rather than relying on interviews. This immersive approach reveals nuances missed by traditional reporting.
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Professor Ethan Malek prescribes a powerful homework assignment for any professional unsure about AI: attempt to use it for every single task during a workday. This immersive approach is the fastest way to personally map AI's 'jagged frontier' of capabilities and discover where it can truly add value.
With AI, the line between software and media is disappearing. Natural language coding allows writers to become builders. Concurrently, since building software is now so cheap, an app can serve as a piece of content—a more powerful demonstration of a new technology than a traditional article.
To drive adoption, Axios's CEO gave all staff licensed AI access and a simple mandate: spend 10% of your day finding ways it can improve your specific job and share wins. This bottom-up, experimental approach fostered organic adoption and practical use cases more effectively than a top-down directive.
People increasingly consume real-life events as passive entertainment. AI can economically enable mass-market interactive media where user choices create different outcomes. This could help teach that the future is contingent on our collective decisions, not a pre-written script to be watched.
When Good Star Labs streamed their AI Diplomacy game on Twitch, it attracted 50,000 viewers from the gaming community. Watching AIs make mistakes, betray allies, and strategize made the technology more relatable and less intimidating, helping to bridge the gap between AI experts and the general public.
The nature of citizen journalism is evolving. Previously focused on passively capturing and observing events, a new wave of creators is actively pursuing investigations and deep dives. This shift is fueled by new monetization paths on platforms like YouTube and X, enabling a sustainable model for independent exposes.
As AI makes digital content increasingly artificial and indistinguishable from reality, the value of authentic, in-person human connection will skyrocket. The most powerful counter-position to the AI trend isn't less technology, but rather using technology to facilitate more tangible, "real" world interactions.
California's CalMatters uses an AI called 'Tip Sheet' to analyze public records of politicians, including speeches, votes, and campaign contributions. The AI flags anomalies and potential stories, which it then provides exclusively to human journalists to investigate, creating a powerful human-AI partnership.
Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents, shows them interacting, sharing opinions about their human 'masters,' and even creating their own religion. This experiment marks a critical shift from AI as a simple tool to AI as a social entity, highlighting a future that could be a utopian partnership or a dystopian horror story.
Instead of generating data for human analysis, Mark Zuckerberg advocates a new approach: scientists should prioritize creating novel tools and experiments specifically to generate data that will train and improve AI models. The goal shifts from direct human insight to creating smarter AI that makes novel discoveries.
