Machines Like Us

• How Do You Report the News in a Post-Truth World?

  If you’re having a conversation about the state of journalism, it’s bound to get a little depressing. Since 2008, more than 250 local news outlets have closed down in Canada. The U.S. has lost a third of the newspapers they had in 2005. But this is about more than a failing business model. Only 31 percent of Americans say they trust the media. In Canada, that number is a little bit better – but only a little. The problem is not just that people are losing their faith in journalism. It’s that they’re starting to place their trust in other, often more dubious sources of information: TikTok influencers, Elon Musk’s X feed, and The Joe Rogan Experience.  The impact of this shift can be seen almost everywhere you look. 15 percent of Americans believe climate change is a hoax. 30 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. 10 percent believe the earth is flat. A lot of this can be blamed on social media, which crippled journalism's business model and led to a flourishing of false information online. But not all of it. People like Jay Rosen have long argued that journalists themselves are at least partly responsible for the post-truth moment we now find ourselves in. Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU who’s been studying, critiquing, and really shaping, the press for nearly 40 years. He joined me a couple of weeks ago at the Attention conference in Montreal to explain how we got to this place – and where we might go from here. A note: we recorded this interview before the Canadian election was called, so we don’t touch on it here. But over the course of the next month, the integrity of our information ecosystem will face an inordinate amount of stress, and conversations like this one will be more important than ever.  Mentioned:"Digital News Report Canada 2024 Data: An Overview," by Colette Brin, Sébastien Charlton, Rémi Palisser, Florence Marquis "America’s News Influencers,"  by Galen Stocking, Luxuan Wang, Michael Lipka, Katerina Eva Matsa,Regina Widjaya,Emily Tomasik andJacob LiedkeFurther Reading: "Challenges of Journalist Verification in the Digital Age on Society: A Thematic Review," Melinda Baharom, Akmar Hayati Ahmad Ghazali, Abdul Muati, Zamri Ahmad"Making Newsworthy News: The Integral Role of Creativity and Verification in the Human Information Behavior that Drives News Story Creation," Marisela Gutierrez Lopez, Stephann Makri, Andrew MacFarlane, Colin Porlezza, Glenda Cooper, Sondess Missaoui"The Trump Administration and the Media (2020)," by Leonard Downie Jr. for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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• A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking at the Story All Wrong.

  When the American company OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was the first time that a lot of people had ever interacted with Generative AI. ChatGPT has become so popular that, for many, it’s now synonymous with artificial intelligence.But that may be changing. Earlier this year a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched its own AI chatbot, sending shockwaves across Silicon Valley. According to DeepSeek, their model – DeepSeek-R1 – is just as powerful as ChatGPT but was developed at a fraction of the cost. In other words, this isn’t just a new company, it could be an entirely different approach to building artificial intelligence.To try and understand what DeepSeek means for the future of AI, and for American innovation, I wanted to speak with Karen Hao. Hao was the first reporter to ever write a profile on OpenAI and has covered AI for The MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So she’s better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.Mentioned:“The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world,” by Karen HaoFurther Reading:“DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,” by DeepSeek-AI and others.“A Comparison of DeepSeek and Other LLMs,” by Tianchen Gao, Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Gabriel Moryoussef“Technical Report: Analyzing DeepSeek-R1′s Impact on AI Development,” by Azizi Othman

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• Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To Win It Back.

  Do I have your attention right now? I’m guessing probably not. Or, at least, not all of it. In all likelihood, you’re listening to this on your morning commute, or while you wash the dishes or check your e-mail.We are living in a world of perpetual distraction. There are more things to read, watch and listen to than ever before – but our brains, it turns out, can only absorb so much. Politicians like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If you’re constantly saying outrageous things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone.”As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention – and, now, he’s decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.Hayes joined me to explain how our attention became so scarce, and what happens to us when we lose the ability to focus on the things that matter most.Mentioned:"Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest," by Zeynep TufekciFurther Reading:"Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction," by Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez."The Attention Economy Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism," by Claudio Celis Bueno“The business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Group’s efforts to capitalize on news consumption,” Brice Nixon

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• New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You Might Think

  It’s become pretty easy to spot phishing scams: UPS orders you never made, banking alerts from companies you don’t bank with, phone calls from unfamiliar area codes. But over the past decade, these scams – and the technology behind them – have become more sophisticated, invasive and sinister, largely due to the rise of something called ‘mercenary spyware.’The most potent version of this tech is Pegasus, a surveillance tool developed by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once Pegasus infects your phone, it can see your texts, track your movement, and download your passwords – all without you realizing you’d been hacked.We know a lot of this because of Ron Deibert. Twenty years ago, he founded Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that has helped expose some of the most high profile cases of cyber espionage around the world.Ron has a new book out called Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy, and he sat down with me to explain how spyware works, and what it means for our privacy – and our democracy.Note: We reached out to NSO Group about the claims made in this episode and they did not reply to our request for comment.Mentioned:“Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy,” by Ron Deibert“Meta’s WhatsApp says spyware company Paragon targeted users in two dozen countries,” by Raphael Satter, ReutersFurther Reading:“The Autocrat in Your iPhone,” by Ron Deibert“A Comprehensive Analysis of Pegasus Spyware and Its Implications for Digital Privacy and Security,” Karwan Kareem“Stopping the Press: New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus Spyware Operator,” by Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert

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• A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

  We’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI: how it’s changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness.But what we haven’t done on this show is try to explain how AI actually works. So this seemed like as good a time as any to ask our listeners if they had any burning questions about AI. And it turns out you did.Where do our queries go once they’ve been fed into ChatGPT? What are the justifications for using a chatbot that may have been trained on plagiarized material? And why do we even need AI in the first place?To help answer your questions, we are joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, and the best person I know at helping people (including myself) understand artificial intelligence.Further Reading:“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building It Anyway,” Machines Like Us podcast“ChatGPT is blurring the lines between what it means to communicate with a machine and a human,” by Derek Ruths“A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going,” by Michael Wooldridge“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” by Melanie Mitchell“Anatomy of an AI System,” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler“Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, how has generative AI helped businesses?,” by Joe Castaldo

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