Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

You cannot talk about the future of media, or the future of anything for that matter, without talking about AI. What generative AI does is pretty much exactly what journalism does: digest information, highlight what matters and render it to an audience in a fetching, attention grabbing way. For journalism, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, judging from history, it’s both or either: all depending on how it’s used. There’s already alarming evidence that Google’s pivot to AI summaries in its search, rather than links, is decimating referral traffic to newsrooms. It’s also undeniable that those same newsrooms are using AI to automate the grunt work of information gathering for journalism.

To explore both the peril and promise, I’m joined by two guests who approach this upheaval from opposite sides of the media-tech divide. Jessica Chan is head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity.ai, a rising player in AI-powered answer engines. Troy Thibodeaux leads AI strategy at the Associated Press, a legacy newsroom that’s long been a leader in automating journalism with integrity.

This conversation—recorded live at my University of Chicago class—dives into the licensing dilemmas facing publishers, the safeguards newsrooms are building around generative content, and the hopeful ways AI is being used to personalize, streamline, and even monetize trustworthy journalism.

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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