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A small publisher, buried under AI-generated pitches, will now take them only by phone (Nieman Lab). When producing a plausible submission costs nothing, the only useful filter is one the machine can’t cheaply fake, and right now that’s a voice on a live line.
That verification cost is everywhere. More than a million people have already clicked LinkedIn’s AI-reporter button (The Verge), so the slop is arriving faster than anyone can sort it. Police have been reduced to announcing that the Cat in the Hat is not real, after AI TikToks persuaded people otherwise (BBC). SFMOMA’s AI-assisted Matisse poses the institutional version: what exactly is a museum vouching for when it hangs one (The Atlantic)?
The distribution end of culture, meanwhile, is being settled in private. Trump intervened in the Live Nation antitrust prosecution (WSJ), while California’s attorney general walked out of Paramount settlement talks and looks set to demand channel divestitures (The New York Times).
And in Iceland, where murders barely happen, crime novelists work overtime to make a body believable (The New York Times). Scarcity as a craft problem.
All of our stories below.
