Balaji and Taylor Lorenz on AI and Media
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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I think the media guys think the tech guys started, and the tech guys think the media guys started. I think the media guys think the tech guys started by economically disrupting them.
I think this is why we're seeing such a resurgence in live streaming and interest in in these sort of, like, communal experiences because, like, live is something that is so hard to fit. It is such a, like, a human thing.
We actually need to have decentralized cryptographic truth that's not behind a paywall that anybody can verify no matter how poor they are, no matter what. I think just like you should not be subject nonconsensually to government surveillance, you shouldn't be subject non consensually to corporate surveillance.
Okay. But what about an independent media reporter? Is that okay?
What happens when anyone or anything can generate information at scale? AI is making it easier than ever to create content, but much harder to verify it. As agents generate text, images, and even identities, the systems we've relied on for trust, from media institutions to social networks, start to break down. In response, new ideas are emerging. Cryptographic verification, decentralized identity, and new forms of social coordination that aim to prove what's real rather than simply assert it. But these shifts also raise deeper questions about privacy, accountability, and the role of journalism
And so I think as much as I like AI within the the digital tribe, it accelerates coding. It's great for search, all this kind of stuff. Between digital tribes, it's often bad because it's just, you know, AI agents spamming 50 different people with a resume or a sales email or something like that and just breaks the commons. And so we're gonna need to have, I think, a whole new generation of human only social networks.
Don't know how verifiable that would be. Like, you can assume some kind of biometric method of it, like, proving that you are a human. And so you have your account that says, I'm Theo. I'm a human. But then on my account, I can just post stuff that I generated with ChatGPT, you know, maybe with some savvy prompts to get around Pangram.
And there's no here's thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's web three of trust. Right? So you would have the way so there's a whole it's just called cat and mouse here, but just to give you a sense, web of trust is a asserts that b is trustworthy, who asserts c is trustworthy, who asserts d is trustworthy, and then the trust drops off. Right? You trust your friend and maybe trust your friend's friend, but probably not your friend's friend's friend's friend's friend. Right? And so there's a way of modeling that mathematically, and you can have not just one proof point, not just a trust b, but also x
I think instead of like, I I agree with all of that. I I think that people will probably just gravitate towards formats that were I think this is why we're seeing such a resurgence in live streaming and interest in in these sort of like communal experiences because like live is something that is so hard to it is such a like a human thing. And so I
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