Tom Nicholas
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My next video is about... | The Friday(ish) Update
🕑 Added 2024-09-22 21:17:20 +0000 UTCWelcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.
This week, we’ve been powering ahead with getting the next video for the YouTube channel in shape.
The video has been slowly coming together for some time; but it’s now all systems go to get it together for release asap.
And it’s about…
…AI theft and its impact on journalism and free speech.
The video was inspired by a message I got from my agent a few months back. It was letting me know of an article that was about to be published revealing that Anthropic, Apple, and Nvidia had scraped the subtitles of thousands of YouTube videos in order to use them to train their AI models.
And among the videos stolen… was a whole bunch of mine.
I wanted to look at the potential impact that AI theft might have on journalism, political commentary and other forms of news-related content.
What does it mean for us to enter a world in which any article posted to the internet can be scooped up and repurposed by either an AI or tool or someone using it to “write” and publish their “own” work.
The video takes a look at how the internet has already reshaped journalism and popular debate; in both good ways and bad!
And it considers how the rise of AI theft might change things further. And it’s not, I’m afraid, particularly good news.
After a bunch of massive projects in which I’ve traveled across the country to film, this one’s a little more self-contained.
I thought we’d reset to a slightly more video-essay style way of doing things and let the story speak for itself.
But, Georgia (my editor) has been working on some incredible animations and the like to make it just as spectacular!
I’m hoping to have some very versions of some sequences to share with those of you in the Early Bits tier very soon (in fact, I’m just about to review some more editing drafts just now!).
But, have you got any thoughts on how AI theft looks likely to change things?
Let me know below!
Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!
