One underappreciated benefit of this shift toward AI-mediated news creation and distribution is that it makes future attempts at "Fairness Doctrine"-style regulation far less likely or less enforceable. When the news was bottlenecked through centralized institutions (broadcast networks, newspaper chains), there was a logic to trying to regulate viewpoint balance. But in a world where AI can surface millions of individual creators and tailor news discovery to diverse audiences, the very concept of a gatekeeper disappears.
That's not without challenges — echo chambers, misinformation, etc. — but it also makes top-down control of "acceptable" viewpoints much harder to implement. Ironically, AI's decentralizing force may end up defending the very pluralism that earlier media regulation often threatened, even if unintentionally.
LLMs do have a "hallucination" problem, although more recent models have mitigated that somewhat by including sources or explaining their reasoning. You can check their work to some extent, in other words.
One underappreciated benefit of this shift toward AI-mediated news creation and distribution is that it makes future attempts at "Fairness Doctrine"-style regulation far less likely or less enforceable. When the news was bottlenecked through centralized institutions (broadcast networks, newspaper chains), there was a logic to trying to regulate viewpoint balance. But in a world where AI can surface millions of individual creators and tailor news discovery to diverse audiences, the very concept of a gatekeeper disappears.
That's not without challenges — echo chambers, misinformation, etc. — but it also makes top-down control of "acceptable" viewpoints much harder to implement. Ironically, AI's decentralizing force may end up defending the very pluralism that earlier media regulation often threatened, even if unintentionally.
My concern about AI is how will we know how truthful it is? Of course, that applies to current news Sources as well.
LLMs do have a "hallucination" problem, although more recent models have mitigated that somewhat by including sources or explaining their reasoning. You can check their work to some extent, in other words.