this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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Liberal democracy was always a race of who could buy the biggest megaphone. Now they are worried that AI is making it even easier to fling shit and spin lies. Nothing however breaks because of AI, it was all about as dysfunctional as it could get before. What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.
The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.
I think you've got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).
The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.
The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren't outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.
News isn't being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.