Ask A Genius 1267: Inflection Upon Inflection
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/02/15
Rick Rosner: So, you’ve got more powerful propaganda now. We no longer have the fairness doctrine—the policy Reagan eliminated in the 1980s—which required opposing candidates to be given equal airtime. Although many news outlets still try to adhere to that principle, I’m not exactly sure what the doctrine originally stated. Essentially, if you aired a pro-gun editorial on your local news station, you were required to present an anti-gun perspective as well. Regardless, that principle has been thoroughly undermined. Newspapers are dying. For example, the Los Angeles Times measures about 30 pages on most days, including full-page ads.
That means there are 20 pages of actual articles, including sports, entertainment, a comics page, the column that replaced Dear Abby, and half a page of classified ads. There isn’t much genuine news left. Ten years ago, the LA Times ran 60 pages. Newspapers are now mostly read by older people, and even cable news channels tend to attract viewers in their mid-sixties. Does it matter how mainstream media is today? They aren’t as widely watched or read as they once were. Nevertheless, consider that the Washington Post is now owned by Bezos—who is more than willing to pander to Trump—while the LA Times is owned by a Trump-friendly billionaire whose op-ed page has been hollowed out. There’s a sense of exhaustion in both mainstream and social media.
Everyone fought hard on social media—I was tweeting anti-Trump messages ten times a day leading up to the election—but it didn’t work. Now, I don’t tweet that much. Sometimes, the mainstream media caves in and rolls over for Trump and Republican talking points; sometimes, they don’t. Even when they resist, it hardly matters. I read a tweet today explaining that Trump won over 18- to 29-year-olds by bombarding them with misinformation that undermined their preferred sources of information, such as podcasts and social media. It won’t be through mainstream media if we win these people back.
I believe mainstream media is starved of advertising dollars and is now going elsewhere. As a result, magazines are thinner or going out of business, and newspapers, too, are suffering. Consequently, any pushback against Republican nonsense is unlikely to succeed via mainstream outlets. Perhaps if you were planning for 2028, about 25% of your campaign should rely on mainstream sources, leaving 75% to adopt the tactics the Republicans used this time.
We now have all the tools to make our lives easier as journalists—tools for fact-checking, editorializing, and collaboration. Using these tools, you can be an effective and productive journalist without needing a massive team. Technology can help significantly at a low cost. However, those same technologies also enable targeting journalists because of their stature and the critical role they play in delivering information in a democratic society.
We now consider journalists to be embedded and reliable sources—more so than “the media,” as Musk might say, which he describes as a form of digital demagoguery. We still need individuals with sound judgment and extensive experience to analyze complex issues. In the future, these systems will assist us in distinguishing, for example, a fake image from a real one or determining the correct context of a photograph of a diplomat taken in a specific location. As a result, we can conduct more sophisticated investigative work.
I believe that eventually, AI will be in charge. But before that happens, those who know how to use and control AI will be in charge. I also feel that as we transition to a computer-based civilization, the arc of the moral universe will bend in a liberal direction. I don’t see misinformation winning in the medium term. That said, one might worry that if AI—and those proficient in its use—are in charge, they might prefer a world where misinformation reigns. After all, AI can generate more persuasive falsehoods than those already circulating. However, I’d like to believe that when AI is tasked with determining the most efficient way for the world to function, it will decide that a society in which a large population is permanently misled is not sustainable.
What do you think?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are just too many unknowns. It’s an open field right now. Many journalists—across the political spectrum, from conservatives and centrists to far-left independents—feel great uncertainty. As a freelancer, I see that everyone is, in a sense, flying blind at this point.
Rosner: We even had a minor “AI earthquake” today when DeepSeek, a Chinese AI, announced its progress over the weekend. I experimented with it briefly last week and conversed more about it today. It reminds me of Claude AI—friendly, approachable, and organized into neat bullet points—though it hints at ChatGPT’s style.
Jacobsen: The team behind DeepSeek mentioned that it cost only $5,600,000 to train their model, compared to around $100,000,000 for some other AIs, such as one from Anthropic. This news even have caused the Nasdaq to drop by 2 or 3%. There’s a lot of upheaval on the AI front.
One thing is predictable: AI will profoundly disrupt our lives for decades to come. In a somewhat convoluted way, the message is clear—the future will be different, and we can’t entirely predict it. The only semi-precise forecast is that change will occur faster than it has in previous eras—a revolution of the mind rather than of the body, as was the case with the early industrial revolutions.
Let’s call it a day for now.
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