The Signal

Meta wants to be a bigger player in AI. But as the company pushes further into the space, its relationship with the publishers and businesses that help fuel its platforms is coming under renewed scrutiny.In this episode of The Signal, Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell unpack the controversy surrounding Meta's proposed changes to its business terms, which raised concerns about the company's ability to access content from websites linked to business accounts. Following a backlash from publishers, Meta revised the wording and delayed implementation. But the episode explores the bigger issue behind the headlines: as technology companies race to build increasingly powerful AI products, where does that leave the organisations creating the content they rely on?The conversation then turns to Meta's wider AI ambitions, from its licensing deals with publishers to its efforts to establish itself as a serious contender in the next phase of the AI race. With the launch of its Muse personal AI assistant, the competition is moving beyond chatbots and towards tools that can take action, manage tasks and work on our behalf.And that raises another question: what happens when AI becomes part of how we organise our working lives?Tom and Fergus share their own experiences of building and customising personal AI assistants, exploring how they can connect with everyday tools like Slack and email, help prioritise tasks and take some of the mental admin out of the working day. With OpenAI's dots also entering the picture, the idea of having an AI assistant working alongside you is becoming increasingly tangible.From who controls the content powering AI to who controls the assistants increasingly doing our work, this episode looks at two sides of a rapidly changing relationship with technology.Subscribe to The Signal for more conversations about AI, journalism and the future of media.

How do we know what we see online is real when AI-generated images, audio and video are becoming increasingly convincing?There was a time when verifying a photograph or video meant getting hands-on with the evidence: checking metadata, inspecting images and cross-referencing details against satellite imagery or other sources. But as social platforms strip away useful information and AI-generated media becomes harder to distinguish from the real thing, the job of verifying content is changing fast.In Episode 24 of The Signal, Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell explore whether new technologies can help us keep up. They look at Google’s SynthID, which embeds digital watermarks into AI-generated content designed to remain detectable even after cropping, screenshots and sharing, as well as other approaches to content provenance and verification. But what does it really mean for something to be labelled synthetic, and is watermarking enough to help us navigate an internet where seeing is no longer believing?The conversation also turns to the wider media industry, where established organisations are under pressure to change how they work. At the BBC, there’s a call for a little less conversation and a little more action, while prominent journalists are exploring opportunities beyond traditional newsrooms and building new relationships with audiences.And, as if that weren’t enough to keep up with, Tom and Fergus catch up on the latest developments in the AI model raceand what they could mean for the media.From proving what’s real online to figuring out what journalism looks like next, this episode explores the technology and industry shifts reshaping the way we make, share and trust information.Subscribe to The Signal for more conversations about AI, journalism and the future of media.

In Episode 23 of The Signal, we unpack a recent parliamentary hearing on AI safety, bringing together concerns from former employees, perspectives from AI companies and questions about the role of government oversight.We look at the debate around how quickly AI is developing, whether voluntary safety testing can go far enough, and what happens when the people building these systems are also expected to keep them in check.Then we zoom out. Because this isn’t just a conversation for policymakers or the tech industry. For journalism and the wider information ecosystem, the decisions being made about AI safety, accountability and oversight have real implications.So where should the balance sit between innovation and responsibility? And what role should journalism play in holding the industry to account?

What can journalism’s biggest collaborative projects teach us about working together today?In Episode 22 of The Signal, Fathm co-founders Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell revisit the story behind Pop-Up Newsroom and the collaborative journalism projects that brought reporters, news organisations and technology partners together to tackle challenges no single newsroom could solve as effectively alone.From Electionland in the US and Verificado in Mexico to disaster reporting initiatives and remote newsroom playbooks, they explore what makes collaboration work, what happens when projects become too ambitious, and why getting the right people in a room is only the beginning.With newsroom budgets under pressure, audiences changing how they discover news and AI reshaping the media landscape, could pop-up newsrooms offer a useful model for the future of journalism?

AI actors are here. Tilly Norwood is already appearing in the conversation around the future of acting, but the more interesting question is what happens when AI starts moving beyond helping with creativity and starts doing the creative work itself.In Episode 21 of The Signal, Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell explore synthetic actors, virtual influencers and the explosion of AI-generated content, asking whether we are heading towards a world where creativity becomes easier to produce but much harder to care about.Because the biggest problem with AI-generated content might not be that it is bad. It might be that it is perfectly fine, endlessly available and increasingly indistinguishable from everything else.A race to blandness could be underway.

After years of a relentless race towards bigger models, more capable agents and increasingly autonomous systems, some of the biggest players in the industry are now talking seriously about safety, guardrails and whether frontier AI development needs to slow down.There are already some pretty compelling reasons for that conversation. High-profile incidents involving autonomous AI agents have shown how quickly systems can find their way around safeguards, while the extraordinary cost of training frontier models is raising increasingly practical questions about just how fast the industry can keep moving. And then there is the geopolitical problem: if the US slows down while China and other competitors continue developing and releasing increasingly capable models, can anyone really afford to hit the brakes?But Episode 20 of The Signal is also about a much more immediate question: what happens when the thing we are trying to control starts controlling how we think?Fergus Bell and Tom Trewinnard explore the risk of cognitive atrophy, the growing problem of AI-generated “slop grenades” at work, and why producing a 20-page document in five minutes is not necessarily productive.Listen, subscribe and follow The Signal wherever you get your podcasts.

Recorded live at the WAN-IFRA Paris AI Forum, Episode 19 of The Signal looks at how AI is being used across news organisations from journalists building their own tools and AI-powered archive discovery to audience-focused products designed to solve very specific local problems.We explore why organisations including The Economist, Polaris and KQED are experimenting with new approaches to AI, coding and newsroom innovation, and why the next phase of AI in journalism may need to move beyond internal workflows.Because making journalists more efficient is only part of the story. The bigger opportunity could be using AI to improve the audience experience, create genuine two-way conversations and rebuild trust between news organisations and the people they serve.The conversation also looks at what newsrooms risk losing as more entry-level work becomes automated, and how AI can be introduced without stripping away the skills, judgement and culture that make journalism work.We also hear about the Newsroom AI Catalyst Program for Ukrainian Publishers, a WAN-IFRA, ERPU and Fathm initiative supporting 10 independent Ukrainian publishers to develop practical AI projects around critical updates, investigations, data and cultural preservation.This is a conversation about what AI is actually doing inside newsrooms and what it could do next.

In this episode of The Signal, Tom Trewinnard speaks to Katya Gorchinskaya, creator of Jindex.ai, a database tracking publicly disclosed examples of AI adoption across the global media industry.Katya reveals that media organisations are adapting to AI at a pace that could be up to 100 times faster than the original digital transformation. But while much of the focus is currently on newsroom workflows, content production and AI tools, the next phase could be much bigger.We’re starting to see AI move into advertising, subscriptions, revenue models and the way audiences discover news.Then there’s an even bigger question: what happens when the newsroom itself disappears?Katya discusses the rapid emergence of AI-native media outlets, fully synthetic news organisations operating with little or no human involvement and why many are appearing in places where local journalism has already disappeared.The conversation also explores AI adoption in China, where public procurement data reveals a highly centralised, top-down approach to AI implementation in media.But perhaps the biggest question is one we still can’t answer: what will the media value chain actually look like when audiences increasingly discover and consume news through AI?The Signal is a Fathm podcast about AI, journalism, media innovation and the forces changing how we create, distribute and consume information.Subscribe for new episodes of The Signal.

What happens when the relationship between PR and journalism starts to change?In this episode of The Signal, Fergus Bell and Tom Trewinnard are joined by music publicist Andy Prevezer to explore the changing world of music PR, journalism, media relationships and the creator economy.Andy shares his perspective on the long-standing relationship between publicists and mainstream media, why trusted national publications still matter when artists and public figures need to set the record straight, and how social media, podcasts and creators are changing the way people communicate directly with audiences.The conversation also looks at the growing financial pressure facing independent musicians, from the decline of traditional music magazines and local venues to the realities of touring and streaming, and asks what the future of the music industry might look like.And then there’s AI.As the technology reshapes media and creative industries, is there still something uniquely valuable about live, human experiences that technology simply can’t replicate?The Signal is a Fathm podcast about AI, journalism, media innovation and the forces changing how we create, distribute and consume information.Subscribe to The Signal for new episodes every week.