Heyyyyy girlies! I took a few weeks off for no reason, but I’m back with all of the random content you may or may not have been paying attention to these past couple of weeks. I figure many of you are already getting the mainstream pop culture news so this newsletter will continue to be a compilation of the random shit that grabs my attention.
Love you all and enjoy!
Journalism is taking a massive hit if you haven’t been paying attention. With mass layoffs at major publications to the now unlimited ways of receiving information - especially on socials, it seems unclear what will happen to the journalism industry.
One major threat to journalism and the news industry is the rise of LLMs and AI services. I enjoyed this opinion piece on AI's role in all of it. He reminds us that:
But they did not fundamentally alter the fact that the internet had hollowed out the value of the daily newspaper. Back in the day, if you wanted to know a sports score, a stock quote, a movie showtime, where the garage sales were or what concerts were coming up, you looked in the newspaper. Now, the web allows you to find this information more quickly elsewhere. So, if consumers once had 20 reasons to buy a newspaper, now they had only one: news — the labor-intensive, expensive work of reporting and writing the news — which isn’t a thing advertisers are especially excited to be associated with.
But now, AI services are making the situation much more complex:
The problem has never been that platforms post links to news articles — that’s what they should do. The problem is that new technology has created a landscape where they might not need to link to news sites at all — they can just take the news, have a robot rewrite it and publish it in their own products.
But the role of the journalist may be more useful than we think:
If LLM training is indeed held to be a fair use but grounding is not, the publishers’ ability to verify the information or infuse it with up-to-date facts becomes not merely valuable but potentially differentiating for their own products. A small, local media company would be able to license its local articles and factual information to generative AI services, but a large media company might choose not to.
Finally, I am very intrigued by how he describes the future relationship between news and the consumer.
In the print era, publishers created “articles,” printed them on paper and distributed that paper to their readers. The web changed everything about the distribution and the literal paper, while the articles remained mostly untouched. But in the future, publishers will have to think less about those articles and more about conversations with users. The users will interact less and less with the actual articles and instead talk about the articles with what the tech industry used to call “intelligent agents.”
What do you think?
Have you ever heard of the term “enshittification”? I hadn’t either! The term refers to “platform decay and the decreasing quality of online platforms that acted as a two-sided market.”
Although it’s still massively addicting, I agree with this article describing the “enshittification” of TikTok. The article describes the situation with Facebook:
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.
Do you think the same thing is happening on TikTok with the addition of the unbearable TikTok shops?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me? First chin lypo now this… “dimpleplasties” have become the latest trend. There's nothing really to say, but why?
Dazed Magazine launched a new app that is basically a networking app for creatives. I, of course, had to join it even though describing myself as a creative is definitely questionable.
Despite my apprehensions, the app was honestly popping off with people posting about job openings or sharing their work in hopes of landing a gig. I love to see smaller connection apps like this actually thrive.
I'm also obsessed with Diem if you haven’t checked it out yet- basically a Reddit for women!
The NHL All-Star weekend was iconic and this may have been the most iconic part…
and this…
Obsessed with Stella Ski
Sorry Taylor girlies
Enjoy the week!!