Google's 'Genesis' AI: Revolutionizing News Creation

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1:26And they're pitching this to major news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and News Corp, who owns a lot of other news companies. So of course, as you can imagine, journalists are not happy about this. So today on the podcast, we're going to be diving into the implications of this tool, what it looks like it's able to do, Google's comments on this, my own experience in this space, and we're going to be breaking down where we see this going in the future. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So the first thing to know is the fact that if you go and search for this, you will see hundreds of articles on this topic.

1:58I think this is a chord that, you know, struck a nerve for many journalists who are writing about it. I recently, you know, was reading an article on The Verge about it, and they have a lot of different, like, essentially, I don't want to say hit pieces, I totally understand. It's like, they feel very threatened, they feel like they could be replaced. And so they're writing all the cons of this software and this technology, which you can see from one side like how it's true and accurate but you can see on the other side that there definitely is some protectionism going on and so yeah let's jump into what this thing actually does so essentially what this tool by google is able to do is it's able to process factual data and then churn out news copy so essentially what this thing is able to do is you can input a ton of data into this thing you can input you know results from the quarterly earnings from a company you can put in statements, you can put in tweets, you can put in, you can essentially have this thing attached to a whole bunch of different data sources.

2:56And then you can get it to write articles on different topics based off of those data sources. And, you know, we've seen the ability of Chad Chippey-T to write articles and stuff. This isn't very, this isn't far off. And so I think, obviously, there's a lot of big journalistic companies, there's a lot of newspapers and whatnot, and journals that are being pitched to this at the moment. I haven't seen any that have signed up for it or no one has made a specific announcement about this. Maybe they're making this little leak about it to see how the public responds because journalists definitely are not happy about this.

3:30That being said, one executive that was demoed this product, he said that he views Genesis more like a personal assistant or helper rather than a fully fledged journalist. And Google, a Google spokesperson, which was Jen Crider, she actually offered a statement to, I believe, The Verge it was and she confirmed that Google's partnership with news publishers especially the smaller players was really important to them she said that they had an aim to explore and provide AI enabled tools that could potentially aid journalists in their work I think Google's spin on this and a lot of people spin on this is no we're not going to replace journalists we're just you know coming up with a really great tool that can help them and I think it's kind of the same spin that Microsoft had with Microsoft Copilot they're like look we're not replacing developers we have microsoft copilot to help uh to help you know developers with their coding i actually think microsoft had a better um has a better argument there with developers because you know a lot of things in code are there's not you know it's not black and white there's not necessarily one way to do things there's a lot of different ways some developers are extremely creative in how they code things um and how they're able to figure things out and so i i mean it sounds bad because now it sounds like i'm i'm saying journalists are not creative so i'll okay Let's do that.

4:45Let's talk about where I think this does not work for journalists. So number one, investigative reporting, being able to go and dig in and investigate something. I think 100 % this is not going to be able to replace. Journalists won't be replaced. But that being said, when it comes to putting all of your data together into one article, for example, I think this still works. So let's say you have an investigative journalist. They go and they research a bunch of companies. They reach out to a bunch of people to get comments from inside a company, some confidential data. They get some leaks, some financial statements, whatever.

5:20They uncover a fraud within a company. they I mean theoretically you give all this data to this genius platform and have it write out a really good expose article but that being said of course this thing isn't gonna go in and and gather all that data now is it possible that in the future an AI could like go and send emails to pertinent people and try to find leakers and like put together an expose article yes an AI could theoretically do that you give it the mission of write an expose article on any company that you think is, you know, engaging in corrupt practices. In fact, you could write an AI model that says, study the top, you know, study the stock market, look for trends, we'll show you trends of companies that were committing fraud, and what their products were, and what the news articles were saying about them.

6:04You could, I mean, this sounds crazy, right? But like, imagine you develop a, an AI model that is able to detect fraud in the stock market. And then you have another AI model that goes in and tries to email people within the company and ask them for information and tries to put an expose article on them. You have someone like Hindenburg. I mean, that'd be extremely beneficial to a lot of short sellers to be able to develop complex software like this. And it sounds crazy right now, but it's possible, so it will be done. I think that's one thing to note is if it's possible to do with AI and people are like, oh, but AI is not there yet.

6:40Okay, well, it inevitably will get there. like ai is improving look at the rate of progress we're seeing if it's possible and someone stands to benefit from it you know i mean people that are being defrauded should know the company that they're engaging with is committing fraud and short sellers have massive you know billion dollar financial incentives whistleblowers uh financial incentives to expose people or to you know whatever so technology like that will come out it'll exist and maybe that won't be public maybe you won't ever know about it or no company will ever announce it but like if Hindenburg is listening to this right now, like all they have to do is hire some data scientists to put something together like this.

7:19And they have, you know, some massive, massive potential for making billions and billions of dollars. Why, why wouldn't they do that? They will do that. So I think, um, that's just, you know, one interesting, or this one interesting thought. So that's where this thing goes. I guess that's the longterm. That's where this thing goes. And And so in the meantime, journalists right now are obviously not happy about it. There was a quote by Kreider from Google that says, The tool could potentially suggest headlines or offer different writing styles to journalists. We're hoping that this emerging technology will bolster journalists' productivity and creativity, similar to how our assistive tools have been enhancing user experiences in Gmail and Google Docs.

8:01Okay, so you can see Google here. It's so funny. usually tech companies like really a drum up interest about their tech and how cool and powerful it's going to be and then here all of a sudden you know that the opposite is true when you have a company like Google like downplaying their tech it's like it can suggest headlines or different writing styles it's like you don't need a complex powerful AI to suggest headlines like I use headline suggestion tools like you know five years ago on you know random little websites like you don't need headline suggestion tools you don't need you know different writing styles like that's absolutely ridiculous that's 100 google trying to just downplay the fact that their tool inevitably can replace journalists and therefore it will replace journalists is that a good thing i don't i'm not saying that's a good thing i'm saying inevitably many news organizations will replace journalists with this um and yeah i mean i think that's a it's definitely a bummer in a lot of regards however it makes a lot of financial sense when you have a company like BuzzFeed News that declared bankruptcy, there's a whole bunch of news organizations that are declaring bankruptcy.

9:06And so when you have that, when their company has the prospect of declaring bankruptcy or switching to maybe three people in their newsroom are managing 20 AI agents generating articles, of course, they're going to pivot to that. Why would they go bankrupt when they have another alternative? So I think given the environment of today, this inevitably will happen and anyone saying it won't and just saying this is a little co-pilot tool is kind of just blowing smoke um to to make it to make it just downplay the the situation a lot of um a lot of journalists are arguing that you know without actually experiencing genesis forming an opinion about it um and its effectiveness could be premature um a lot of people are saying you know a look at previous attempts to leverage machines for journalistic tasks like what uh cnet and red adventures and geomedia tried to do um show that it didn't you know doesn't do a good job and essentially with cnet what happened was they had an ai that was writing and it uh it was the early days of chat gpt it was writing a article about in um interest rates and it did some calculations on the interest rate thing wrong so everyone kind of roasted them for it and they were like okay we're gonna stop using ai to write articles i mean the rest of the content in the article was perfect and great just they probably should have had someone fact check the math in there because we know that ai is not very great at doing math or the current language models of course that's something that will also get improved and will get fixed in the future so um that's something that you know journalists are pointing to like oh we can't you know we can't let ai write articles because of blah blah i think at the end of the day it's like this thing could write an article and then you could have someone go fact check it look we're fact checking articles live now anyways like how is that if you could spin this spin this article out in a tenth of the time and And then you just got to sit there and fact check to make sure everything's accurate.

10:55And especially if it can cite its sources from where it grabbed the data, then I think that makes perfect sense to speed up the process. And hey, like, let's look at it from a positive stance. People will be able to get the news faster. You'll be able to break a story. Something happens. You'll be able to gather a ton of data and break a story like five minutes later instead of five hours later or five days later. so I think there's a lot of potential and there's possibly some real world benefits to the consumer by being able to get this information faster so I think that obviously AI on the internet this isn't new we're seeing Bing and Bard and ChatGPT and they're all able to generate articles and content you know some journalists recently noted that even Google's AI model designed for hospitals has its own pitfalls, right?

11:45They're trying to point out some shortcomings, which I 100 % think are relevant. They're important to talk about. These AIs are not perfect. But I just think that anyone pointing at AI and its flaws and saying, you know, like, see, look, this thing, it messed up. You know, like, the CNET articles, math was wrong on the interest rates or, like, this thing isn't good. I think that that's, it's ridiculous because we know that inevitably those things will get better. So it's like, let's just look. Like, you can love it or hate it, but if you want to know what's going to happen in the future, like, look at what it can do now and forecast the future of where this thing goes.

12:21Don't try to, like, nitpick at little flaws you see now and say, like, this is why it will never work. Like, it will definitely work, and we should, you know, prepare for a conversation. Do you want to ban all AI, make it so only humans can be journalists? Like, you know, I'm not saying I agree with any of those paths, but like, let's be realistic. If you want a journalist to never be replaced by AI, you should probably start really thinking about the next steps instead of just trying to nitpick at some small flaws in AI. Because inevitably, AI is going to do a lot of this stuff. I think a lot of potential users have some reservations about Google's commitment to product development.

13:04um well actually to be honest this is a point i've heard some journalists bring up they're like why would we go and integrate google genesis and start getting it to write our news articles because google like they're kind of notorious for like making products and then killing them so like what if google just kills this product i think that's just like kind of a ridiculous uh complaint if it was a really popular product and everyone used it google probably wouldn't kill it and if they did, I'm sure like this is a total, this is a totally viable, visible, logical use case, someone else will do it, it'll be successful.

13:37So regardless of Google, regardless of Google's track record of killing things, I don't think that's a good argument for why you shouldn't use Genesis. If it's a useful tool, Google will do it or someone else will do it. Anyways, I thought it was kind of funny. So I think that it is important to note that the relationship between Google and the news industry hasn't actually been super great. I think Google kind of had the impression that with Google News, they were gonna try to help local newspapers to get more readers and whatever. And there's been a lot of people that have complained about how they went about doing that.

14:11And they've attempted to negotiate an accelerated mobile pages or an AMP debacle. And there's some federal lawsuits where essentially Gannett accused Google of maintaining ad tech monopolies that harm local news. So because of that, I think that there definitely are a lot of issues between Google, the relationship with the news industry is a little bit rocky. That being said, I don't know if it's so much Google's fault as just being indicative of what's happening in tech and in the tech industry overall, and how people, you know, like it or not, people are moving away from cable news, they're moving away from newspapers, they're going to read digital articles, and they're going to listen to podcasts or YouTubers or other sources of news that may not always be as traditional.

14:56And so, I mean, like even Twitter, you can get really crazy breaking news analysis in real time from people within a company on Twitter that you can't get from an anchor necessarily. And so I think that people are shifting in their appetite for news. Personally, I have used AI to write a lot of articles for different projects and startups and seen a lot of really good success, a lot of really good content. But again, like my strategy has always been get the AI to write an article, get a human that as, you know, a subject matter expert to go and review and make sure everything looks good, fix anything, correct it, just read over it.

15:32And then we publish. And, you know, doing that personally, I had one specific startup in particular that we were able to about almost 10x our website traffic with AI generated articles that were reviewed by a subject matter expert. So there's no way in my mind that that subject matter expert could have written the amount of content we wrote and could have seen the amount of results for the price that we were able to do it. And that was the only way it was viable for our startup to be able to do that profitably. So I think at the end of the day, whether or not a lot of journalists complain about Google and Genesis, I think Genesis will get used, even if it's not by major news organizations, smaller companies, independent journalists, independent news organizations these things are going to have a massive boon in news and in revenue from tools like this so overall i see this as being a really big thing in the industry that 100 will take off so this will definitely be something that we will continue to follow into the future and see how it plays off plays out across news