Mawell Tani of Semafor writes about how a lot of artificial intelligence coverage has been funded by AI critics.
Tani writes, “The company privately complained to NBC News that the author of the story had been paid by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, as part of a fellowship program that embeds journalists within news organizations for several months to write stories about artificial intelligence and its growing impact.
“OpenAI’s representatives pointed out that Tarbell, which has also supported reporting at Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, and The Los Angeles Times, is funded in part by one of the groups mentioned in the story, the Future of Life Institute, which is dedicated to warning about AI risks. The news organization quietly appended a disclosure to the piece noting the connection.
“Now the Tarbell fellowship itself has become the latest front in a widening battle between accelerationists, including the many aggressive pro-AI development technologists and investors championed by OpenAI and the Trump administration, and skeptics of the guardrail-free development of artificial intelligence, including adherents of the loose movement known as effective altruism. Increasingly, that ideological debate has played out in the media, as OpenAI and its allies attempt to brighten the dark portrait of their industry that’s become common in media coverage.”
Read more here.
