BOTW: Meet Unmade’s AI friend; Are ThinkTV’s job cuts economic or strategic?; Why ARN raided SCA
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on a pleasant summer’s day in London, while you were sleeping.
Today: Our AI experiment; Job cuts at ThinkTV; and ARN’s raid on Southern Cross Austereo.
You’ve only got one more week to lock in our end of financial year offer to become an Unmade member. Your benefits include:
Our weekly Tuesdata analysis;
Your own copy of the book Media Unmade;
The Unmade archive, which gets locked after two months;
The tax deductible feeling of supporting independent, innovative journalism
Guaranteed access to TimBot if we ever decide to put him behind the paywall
Introducing TimBot
Tim Burrowes writes:
I’d like to introduce you to TimBot. We’ve been working on him for a while now.
TimBot is our AI-driven media expert. His answers are based on the contents of my book Media Unmade, along with the last two years of Unmade’s archive.
Now, we’re ready for you to take a look. You’ll find TimBot at timbot.ai
Before you try him out, let me share some BIG caveats.
First: TimBot is a prototype. Sometimes he breaks. If he does so in an interesting way, please do send us a screenshot to cat@unmade.media.
Second: Because TimBot’s computing power is driven by elements of both ChatGPT-3.5 and the recently updated ChatGPT-4, he can be slow, particularly when America is awake. If things are running really slowly, you’ll simply see an error message.
If you’re interested in trying him out, I suggest doing so when this email arrives, while America is still asleep.
This is a collaboration which has been led by the brilliant Nic Hodges at generative AI consultancy Fear of Missing Art, and inhouse by Unmade’s Cat McGinn.
Cat is curating next month’s humAIn – human creativity X AI conference, and will talk more about TimBot there. It’s not too late to buy a ticket to humAIn, by the way. The key principle for curating humAIn was that we wanted everyone on stage to be already grappling with AI, not just talking about it. It seemed important that we got our hands dirty too.
Incidentally, based on our fantastic recent experiences on this project, I’d recommend you talk to FOMA about your own AI needs. We’ve also been working with Abe’s Audio on this project. We’re hoping that by the time humAIn arrives, TimBot will be ready to speak to you too.
If you’re curious how TimBot works, we’ve tried to lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for what it does well, and avoid what it does badly. ChatGPT offers amazing computing power, but as you have probably heard, it can be prone to fantasise when it doesn’t know an answer.
Nic has designed TimBot in such a way that it surfaces what I’ve previously written as the basis of its information, rather than what’s on the wider web. That means the information he’s aware of is more narrow, but his answers should be more accurate.
In the main, this is a proof of concept with applications and implications for both book and journalism publishers. Can you take the knowledge and writing style of an individual writer and turn it into a useful chatbot?
The chart below shows what’s going on under the hood.
We use ChatGPT-3.5 to reformulate the user’s question, including pulling out relevant content from the book and newsletter. ChatGPT-3.5 then uses this to synthesise the best answer, which it finally passes along to the more powerful, but slower ChatGPT-4.
ChatGPT-4 then tidies up this answer and, based on my previous posts, attempts to recreate my own writing voice. As you’ll see, he’s chatty, but not entirely me, just yet. In time, I hope he becomes 20% less flippant and 20% more detail-oriented.
The process happens in a few seconds (and sometimes stalls). It’s certainly not as fast as typing a query into Google but it still feels kind of miraculous.
I’m not the only person to have thought of using AI to create a distinct author voice. The idea that AI could be used to train a chatbot on a particular writer’s style has been occurring to several people almost simultaneously.
Marketing writer Seth Godin launched a similar offering to TimBot this week.
Godin’s bot moves at a similar speed and seems to go through roughly the same thought process as TimBot.
And listeners to Scott Galloway’s various podcasts will have heard him talk about how he is working on a similar reproduction of his writing voice.
Intriguingly, I spoke to a marketer a few days ago, who has taken the writing of Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson and Scott Galloway to create for himself a private virtual marketing adviser. Talk about a dream team.
For authors and publishers, that becomes an issue and challenge of who owns that content. That marketer I mentioned didn’t ask permission from any of the individuals involved. There’s a moral question there that copyright law may not properly cover.
We considered also training TimBot with my dozen years of writing for Mumbrella, but in the end concluded that although it would probably have been legal, it was an ethical grey area, as I don’t own that content, even if I’m the author of it.
The negotiations going on between OpenAI, Google and the major news publishers will hopefully create some sort of licensing framework that could apply to the training of specialised AI chatbots, just as the likes of the Copyright Agency has for content in Australia.
I could also see a time when any new non-fiction book gets an accompanying chatbot.
Another fascinating side issue is the implications of this sort of product for the development of quantum computing.
A major barrier to the utilisation of ChatGPT is speed. As the Large Language Models of ChatGPT-5 and upwards no doubt becoming increasingly powerful, the question is whether they can keep up with demand. Yet they’ll likely be too big to be stored locally on conventional computers.
That’s where quantum computing comes in (declaration of interest: I’m an investor in an Australian quantum computing startup). If that technology becomes ubiquitous then we’ll see the likes of TimBot responding in fractions of a second, not half a minute.
Even with the limitations of speed, some of TimBot’s output has been uncanny. On occasion he has made connections between items I’ve written that I had not spotted myself.
And at the very least, he’s become a useful tool that saves me turning to the index of Media Unmade when I’ve been checking a reference or date.
Please do give TimBot a try. And remember, if you don’t feature in the book, or haven’t been written about on Unmade, TimBot is unlikely to be able to tell you much about yourself. Please do tell us what you find.
Week in AI:
Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s AI conference for media and marketing, humAIn – human creativity x AI writes:
Hardwired headlines
Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, is cutting hundreds of jobs and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to transition from print to digital journalism. Roles like editors and proofreaders will be replaced by AI and automated processes. This move is part of a strategic overhaul of the masthead as a result of declining readership and reputational damage following a series of scandals.
Auto-matons
Chasing Cars, an Australian independent car review platform owned by the insurance provider Auto & General, has launched ChasingCarsGPT, a tool powered by OpenAI to help users research car purchases. The tool uses OpenAI’s technology to scour Chasing Cars’ content library, offering users personalized information on various car models and features. The tool is currently in beta testing.
Crunch time for AI chips
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing $100 million into a centre for generative artificial intelligence, acknowledging the significance of the technology and the need to compete with rivals Microsoft and Google. The centre, a program rather than a physical space, is working with several companies and aims to meet the increasing demand for AI chips.
Dub be good to me
YouTube is testing an AI-powered tool, developed in collaboration with Google’s Aloud, that will enable creators to automatically dub their videos into other languages. The move aims to streamline the dubbing process and extend creators’ reach to international audiences. The company plans to further enhance the tool with features like voice preservation and lip reanimation.
Announcing the DebAIt teams
Amidst the news that tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are spoiling for a cage fight over rumours Meta is launching a Twitter rival, we’re delighted to announce the panellists of the far more cerebral and civilised Great DebAIt which concludes our AI conference humAIn, including one of Australia’s agenda-setting pitch doctors, Darren Woolley.
The speakers will debate the proposition:
“Generative AI is not a threat to media and marketing jobs, but a much-needed tool to expand what’s possible at speed and low cost.”
The speakers are from a range of backgrounds from across the media and marketing world: Dre Horton, Co-Founder, Knowing.Me; Wade Kingsley, Founder, The Ideas Business; Henry Innis, Co-Founder and CEO, Mutinex; Cam Price, Co-Founder and CEO, Leadstory; Larissa Thorne, Director of Digital and Content, KeepLeft, and Darren Woolley, Founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy
humAIn | human creativity x AI takes place in just under three weeks. Tickets are still available.
ARN Media’s SCA punt
It was good while it lasted.
On Monday night, ARN Media picked up a 14.8% chunk of its nearest rival Southern Cross Austereo for an outlay of $38.3m.
The next day it looked like a quick win as the SCA share price soared by 20%.
Since then, the SCA share price faded once again although it is still a little above the month’s historic low of 73c.
What the raid cannot be is the beginning of takeover bid. The media regulations don’t allow anyone to hold more than two FM licences in any one place. SCA (owner of Triple M and the Hit network) and ARN (Kiis and Gold) overlap, everywhere. Which means that SCA is limited to a 15% holding at the most before it is deemed to have a controlling interest.
The ASX announcement suggested that the move was entirely tactical, “a strategic equity investment in a sector that it knows well”.
And that’s probably genuinely the main reason. As I disclosed back in April, I invested in SCA myself (at around 88c) because I felt it was underpriced, so my sentiment is the same. Even in a downturn, even with an unloved regional TV asset, even in a structurally challenged sector, the sum of the parts on SCA looks like more than it’s currently worth.
Part of the insurance policy for ARN is that (until now, anyway) SCA pays its shareholders a decent dividend. So 14.8% of that dividend will now be transferred straight into ARN’s pocket instead.
On a dividend yield well above 10% that’s better than putting the money in the bank.
And it’s not the first time ARN Media has pulled a stunt like this. Back in 2020 when the company was still branded as HT&E, it bought 4.2% of outdoor ad company Ooh Media for $15m before selling it for $49m the following year when the share price recovered.
And there’s one more factor – an insurance policy. That stake makes any attempted takeover of SCA by somebody else messier. ARN’s 14.8% could be enough to block a close vote on a deal it doesn’t like the look of.
Imagine you’re thinking of buying an audio company- do you go after the almost debt free, $300m market cap ARN Media, or the $200m SCA, which comes with the added complexities of a net debt of around $80m and a partisan ownership structure?
A new start for ThinkTV
In the current industry environment, half a dozen redundancies is not, sadly, particularly remarkable.
But when they make up half of the staff of the body responsible for marketing the mediums of television and news publishing, the obvious question is whether the move says something about the state of the industry.
This week we saw six of the 12 staff of the Premium Content Alliance move on. The PCA is the umbrella organisation of what was ThinkTV, ThinkPremiumDigital and ThinkNewsBrands.
Under the shakeup, ThinkPremiumDigital will no longer exist. Which in itself makes sense. Everything is digital now.
With television trying to sell itself as Total TV, and print and online news audiences being promoted to advertisers as much the same thing, a seperate digital media marketing body is superfluous.
The position of the PCA’s shareholders – Nine, Seven, Ten and News Corp – is that the moves are simply logical responses to industry dynamics, not because of a necessity to cut costs.
The move was accompanied by the news that Foxtel has pulled out of ThinkTV. The explanation from Foxtel is that it is prioritising its transition to a streaming led business, with cost “not a consideration”.
Nonetheless, redundancies at a time when advertising is in recession could understandably be assumed to be a sign of retreat. And whatever the strategic justification for the changes, the organisation will obviously now be a smaller cost for its shareholders.
ThinkTV has been a success since its launch in 2016. It was money well spent by the networks. It maintained share at a time when traditional audiences were falling. For a time, ThinkTV brought the free to air networks closer to each other than they had been for years and brought to an end the worst of the poisonous enmities. The networks recognised that the real competition came from outside the TV sector, although tensions have increased again more recently.
Nonetheless, the biggest fight is not within the TV sector. With broadcast audiences now in freefall, the industry needs to sell the message of the reach of Total TV, and move on the trading currencies from the old overnight OzTam system.
Next week’s retirement of long-serving OzTam CEO Doug Peiffer will also create an opportunity for the sector to bring in new energy. Particularly as it attempts to create a marketplace around premium video advertising, and persuade media agencies and marketers to get on board with it.
The changes are a sign of the times. But whether that means the economic times remains to be seen.
Campaign of the Week: Guinness Brewery of Meteorology :
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s ANZ reporter, Casey Martin writes:
This week’s campaign is from Thinkerbell, for Guinness. The pair have created the Guinness Brewery of Meteorology, including localised promotions offering free drinks when the temperature drops.
Read more at LBB online.
Unmade Index:
The Unmade Index fell another 1.02% yesterday, following on from a 2.3% drop on Wednesday. The index, which measured Australia’s listed media and marketing companies now sits at 619.3 point close to a low point for the year.
Yesterday’s biggest fall came to Southern Cross Austereo, down by 5.81% while ARN Media was down by 4.9%. Seven West Media and Nine completed the rout for broadcasters, falling by 1.3% and 1.03% respectively.
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Time to leave you to your Saturday.
By the time you get this, I’ll be fast asleep, but I’ll leave TimBot to hold the fort.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
