Can journalism survive in the age of AI? An interview with Kara Swisher

Journalist Kara Swisher explains the increasingly challenged relationship between the media and big tech and the critical need for journalism to adapt in the age of AI.

May 4, 2024 - 18:30

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Can journalism survive in the age of AI? An interview with Kara Swisher

Is it too late for the media to get it together?

At least when it comes to competing with big tech, that answer is a resounding 'yes,' according to Recode's Kara Swisher.

The Burn Book author joined TheStreet to discuss the challenging nature of the relationship between the media and big tech and journalism can still do to survive amid the rise of AI. Catch the full interview in the video above.

FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

SARA SILVERSTEIN: I want to get right in and start with your book, Burn Book. And a lot of it you talk about a lot of the predictions you made in tech that have been right over and over again. Which of those are you most proud of that was most shocking to the industry that you were right about?

KARA SWISHER: A lot of them I don't remember because we had a lot of scoops and things like that. But I think the one thing is the very base fact that everything that can be digitized would be digitized. I think it's kind of an obvious thing. But 25 years ago, it was not, right, the idea that every industry would be changed by what was happening in tech.

But I think more recently when I wrote that column in the New York Times sort of predicting the insurrection and how it was not sort of I was, I talked about the lies Donald Trump would tell. It would shoot up and down the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem of the right, and then he'd ask them to do something to stop the election. And when I did it, I got a lot of pushback from social media sites because I said, I called them handmaidens to sedition eventually. And I think I felt good about being right about that. Though, I wish I was wrong, I guess.

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SARA SILVERSTEIN: Any predictions that you were wrong about and that surprised you?

KARA SWISHER: You know at first, when eBay, when I when they visited me and I went to look at what they were doing, I thought it was a stupid idea. I just was like, I don't get this. I don't get it at all. And I think I was wrong about that. And now, look, eBay is not doing as well, but the idea was a great one, the idea of marketplaces. And for some reason in that case, I couldn't wrap my head around it. So I was really wrong about that, though, I certainly quickly came around.

I was not a supporter of Amazon, but I thought they would do a lot better than most of the press thought at the time when they called them amazon.bom. I thought Jeff Bezos was a great entrepreneur. And directionally, it was correct. Others, you know, Webvan, so many others failed. But I did believe in commerce after that. But marketplace was something I missed, I think.

Valuations, I didn't think when Facebook got a $15 billion valuation after the Microsoft investment-- I forget what year that was. Maybe 2008 or 2009, I don't remember. I was gobsmacked and I thought it was stupid. And I said so, and I was wrong. Because what they did is they grew into it. They sort of faked it till they made it kind of thing. And I just didn't think that the market would sustain these crazy valuations. But I should have known because they did it before.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And a lot of that it seems like narrative economics is you know-- since I know Shiller wrote a book about it. But how much do you think storytelling is driving the value of tech assets right now?

KARA SWISHER: I think it's two things. I think-- you know, look, there's lots of good stories for businesses and they don't seem to get the kind of lift that others do. There's a mania around some of it, like you saw with the gamestop thing or anything else that has nothing is divorced from value obviously. I think tech gets a pass where they divorce value with-- some tech, not all of it because some of it's really big. But it gets divorced from value.

And so sometimes the story is a good one and it sells it more than it should. Other times, it is a significant business. I think a lot of these in a bad case the currency, the cryptocurrency stocks got hit more because the story was not quite filling in the case of AI. We'll see. The valuations are very high in the private markets. We'll see if they have actual businesses and whether that matters.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And you did predict that the internet was going to ground media as we knew it into dust.

KARA SWISHER: Yes, I did. That was a good one.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: That was a good one. And we work in the media space, so you were really right about that.

KARA SWISHER: It's still doing it. Let me just say, it's not over. But go ahead.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: Well, no, yeah. I was going to say, we need to shift again. What are we still doing wrong, and then we could get to what's happening next with AI? But what are we still doing wrong?

KARA SWISHER: I think it's too late. The media doesn't have technological chops that they need to do to beat these companies. At the time they were coming in, a lot of tech media companies-- first of all, they thought they'd go away because these valuations wouldn't be sustained. Well, they were. So they had the money to do it, right? They have the money and they have the means to do it. And anyone who has the money and the means tends to win in many markets.

And one of the things that was interesting to me is I kept saying, I kept referencing The Twilight Zone episode, the very famous one to serve man. And I kept telling these media companies, it's a cookbook. It's not here to help you. It's here to hurt you. It's here to eat you.

And I think it's the same thing with AI. They've got to use every means at their disposal cop not cooperate with them. Actually, they're your competitors, they are media. Tech companies are media now. And so, and they have the money and the means, and they want to eat you. So what can you do? Like, with AI, you have copyright ability to sue on copyright I think you should sue and negotiate and get as much value out of as it can.

But handing over your value with-- well, they don't have a choice right now because their tech skills are not as high as these tech companies. So again, the big tech companies are owning AI, and media is not. And that's a big deal.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And you called Google the Borg, sucking up all the information. And it does feel like maybe AI is going to do the same thing.

KARA SWISHER: It's Search Plus. I mean, some internet people are calling it that. It's Search Plus. It's calculator plus. It's more and amplified and better and stronger. So it's the same thing. It's the same story. And how many times can you be Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football? I'm not sure. Many? Lots of times? That went on for a while.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And you do use so many sci-fi references. You talk about Star Trek a lot. Are there any specific lessons from Star Trek or sci-fi in general that are your favorite?

KARA SWISHER: You know, I think I used the Star Trek metaphor because that's how I'd like it to be, where everybody gets along and everybody benefits from each other, and it's a united Benetton of people that are always trying to do the best. I think it's more a Star Wars story is the death star is always here, and so is the dark side, you know.

And so I use those metaphors because I think they work well, right? They work well in this idea, whether is it terminator for AI or is it something more benign? I think the answer is terminator is not where we're going but it's something more benign that may be even more dangerous, right? It may be even more slow. I think, media, because they love to tell stories, do so in a dramatic fashion.

And it's been my experience that companies die by the sell rather than by instantly of some tragic accident. This has been going on for 25 years really in earnest. And media still doesn't understand what's happening to it in many, many ways. And there's smaller and smaller and with less and less means. And they're relying on the fact that these companies, that they're here to help us. And they're not here to help us. They're not.

So you have to do other things, like be small or be more nimble, have your costs in line with your revenue. But you have to get used to the idea that they are ascendant.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: For everyone, not just for media, is there a company or a person in tech right now that you think is really dangerous?

KARA SWISHER: No, I don't think dangerous is the wrong way to-- I call Mark Zuckerberg dangerous only because he's inept to the task of the responsibilities that were put upon his shoulders or he put himself on the shoulders. No, it's not dangerous. It's-- well, OK, there are dangerous people going to use it, going to use AI just the way they've used the internet over the past decade. You know, some are very explicit like Donald Trump, and some are very implicit like Nation States that want to create Discord. So I'd look more to the malevolent players than anyone else.

That said, what's really dangerous is that our congress can't pass laws around antitrust or privacy or guidelines around AI. We have to do that because this is the only industry in history that doesn't have significant regulation, giving it guardrails. They just don't. They can whine all they want about other regulations. But every industry, the car industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, however imperfect to have regulations governing them specifically, this one does not.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: Is there a person or a company in tech that isn't a household name yet but you think should be?

KARA SWISHER: No, I think they're pretty obvious, like the Sam Altman's of the world. I met him when he was 19 and had a failed company called Loopt, which I didn't think was going to make it, and it didn't. But you know, you sort of see some people. I'm really interested in those who are making investments in health care and climate change tech. I think they're kind of really interesting and they have more of a mission-driven kind of thing going on. And I kind of like-- also, there's lots of profits, FYI. So that's good too.

I just interestingly did-- I don't know if he's going to be the one that does it. Of course, he Reed Jobs, who's the son of Steve Jobs, has an investment company around health care. I'm super interested in people like him that are doing that. He's trying to make cancer non-lethal for obvious reasons, personal reasons, and investment reasons. And they're doing it through a combination of philanthropy and investment.

There's all these really interesting things happening in the health space and the climate space that I think are interesting. Even these weight loss drugs, I think, is going to is going to change a lot. You're going to sort of kill the diabetic industrial complex. And good riddance to that. And so you just have to sort of look psychedelics, I think, are interesting. A lot more in health care and physical things like climate change tech.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: In your book, especially but just also through your career, you've been consistently brave and confident. Were you always this way?

KARA SWISHER: I don't know. It's so unusual that people ask about that. I'm not sure. I'm just the way I am. I was born this way. I guess, as you know, in a lot of things, I was born this way. I do find it really interesting that people find a confident woman unusual because it's not.

Women are very confident. It's inside all of us. It gets bleached out of us in a lot of ways for lots of reasons. In my case, it didn't. I'm more interested-- I know it sounds stupid, but I like myself. I don't know what to tell you. And I don't think that when I-- and when I'm good at things, I tell you. And I don't find that anything but I find it the truth. And when I'm bad at things, I don't really dwell on them or I don't do them. And so is that confidence or just I know myself really well?

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And the reason that I wanted to ask you that was really because I wanted to ask you if it annoys you that people ask you that, because we don't ask confident, successful men how they got that way.

KARA SWISHER: Yes, we do not. That's right. That's correct. I don't mind being asked it. I do mind being asked by men when they said, you have uncommon confidence. What are you expecting? Docile? Is that where we start is docile or obsequious or thank you sir for letting me in the room? I don't live that way.

So I do find that they're surprised by it. And maybe there's fault all around in that regard. But honestly, whatever. OK, sure. It only tells me they're scared of me. So whatever, good. That helps me too.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: You've accomplished so much. What is next on your list that you would like to achieve?

KARA SWISHER: Well, this book is doing really well. It's a bestseller. So that's good. That's really nice. And I thought it would be-- there hadn't been a tech book that's been really a bestseller in a while except for that Elon book, which is a different creature than mine, I would say. But that's a different situation.

I think I'm really interested in video. I love this idea that cable and television is over because to me, a worldwide global information network should be able to make money and do really well. And so when everyone's going like, oh, no, it's over, I'm like, oh, is it? I don't know. So I'm on a CNN show right now. I'm learning.

But video-- not just video and short things long. Just video. Where is video going and how do you monetize it? I'm always interested in business problems that you can take advantage of when people are looking the other way. Like, podcasting. I did that early, and it turned out pretty good.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And you broke a lot of the rules of journalism all along the way. A lot of things that were ingrained, I think, probably in your journalism education.

KARA SWISHER: No, I broke the rules of journalism. Let me just say, I broke the rules of journalism business. Business, not the journalism. We have been accurate and substantive the whole time. At the very heart of journalism is storytelling that is accurate. That is the heart of-- accurate reporting, accurate writing, and stuff like that-- the heart.

What we've done is done other things too. It added reported analysis. We've had a point of view based on journalism, right? And so one of the things I like when Christiane Amanpour-- and it was about something else, but she was saying, we're truthful, not neutral. I love that. That sort of encapsulated what I thought.

And so in the business sense, I changed that, that you could be a brand, you could do things without the mothership. I think I did change that, the idea that you could tell interesting, compelling stories, that you could build a fan-base. I think that was something journalists were not doing because they were sort of speaking of a borg. You're part of the borg there.

And so I think we definitely-- all things, you talk about all these companies on Substack or whatever, all these new media companies, we were there at the start. And I'm glad that everyone's trying new, innovative things. It's exciting that you can-- I think one thing I did is you can go and make your own way. And I think that was hard for journalists. And it's been proven over and over again in the years since, and I could not be happier.

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