Exploration #141

Hi all. This week we’ve got big, future-of-the-internet news from Google I/O and Microsoft Build, the paradigm shifting release of Google’s Veo 3, pieces on AI and the future of work, and finally, a production of Hamlet filmed in the most unlikely of theaters.

But First…

A quick welcome to our new subscribers from WETA, PBS, WDSE, KXCI, New Hampshire PBS, and others!

It was great seeing so many old friends (not to mention making some new friends) at the PBS Annual Meeting in Atlanta and then at the PMBA meeting in Tucson the following week. While Atlanta was my 20-something^th annual meeting, Tucson was my first PMBA, and it always fun to talk to a new crowd about the confluence of emerging media and public media.

Back in the world of Zoom, I wasn’t able to attend last month’s PMI webinar, Applied AI for Public Media: Marketing, Social, and Digital Strategy, as I was on a plane back to Nebraska. But man, I heard from people about it almost immediately on landing, and y’all seemed to really vibe with it (especially the OpusClip tool, which was also mentioned in the AI breakout session at TechSum). If you missed any part, or want to watch the webinar again, the video recording of the webinar is now live.

We’ve also opened registration on our June 19 webinar, The 50+ Gaming Audience You’re Overlooking. You can read more about it in the Webinars section below, but let me just say here that I think this topic is key to unlocking the future of public media in the US. You don’t have to kick TV and radio completely to the curb, but if you aren’t making room for games in your service to your community, you are trading away your future as a public media institution.

In other housekeeping details, getting presentations ready for the PBS Annual Meeting and PMBA has sucked up a lot of time that would otherwise go to this newsletter. As a result, I’ve got 400+ open tabs in my Safari browser (still, after locking content on this exploration) and I’m getting a couple dozen new emails a day with info that might be of interest. So, I’m going to try and step up the pace of publishing over the next two weeks before I go back out on the road, just to catch us all up. I’m also changing up the format at bit, clustering content around topics, as opposed to news pieces and think pieces. It’s an evolving process, but let me know what you think.

Static 

One night a group of us were out at a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta, and I ordered a fizzy water. This confused the waitress.

• Me: You know like a Topo Chico or a LaCroix.

• Her: Um, I’m not sure. You mean like a club soda?

• Me: Me, maybe unless you have something bottled.

• Her: We have Mineragua.

• Me: Never heard of it. Is that fizzy?

• Her: <Looks confused> Hold on, I’ll ask. <Leaves/Returns>
  He said it’s like TV static in your mouth.

• Me: That sounds perfect!

Back at the meeting there was no shortage of TV static for our minds either. Some came from politics of the moment (broadly, folks at the conference showed mix of bruised spirits and ‘happy warrior’ resistance). But some of that static was also fed into the signal thanks to the keynote presentation on AI from Shelly Palmer.

Don’t get me wrong. Palmer is smart. I’ve linked to his work here before, probably should again, and, regardless, you should occasionally check out his blog. But his presentation to PBS was clearly a lightly tweaked version of his ‘scary-AI-talk-for-apprehensive-C-suite-audiences’ (which someone - you know who you are - astutely suggested might have originally been created for the packaged goods industry). Palmer, as they say, understood the assignment. The goal was clearly to shock the audience into thought, discussion and action. But it was also a talk that was meant to explode in front of you in the room and then not to be parsed much later (or for that matter, in real time either).

(I haven’t heard if they are going to post a video of the talk, but Palmer extensively referenced the Google I/O ‘25 keynote, and you can watch that here. He inexplicably also failed to reference the equally important Microsoft Build keynote, and you should check that out as well.)

If you weren’t there, and heard it was deeply concerning, take a breath. Palmer’s talk carried with it an assumption, that we were in public media are not taking this moment seriously enough. So, if you’re reading this - and especially if you’re reading this and you’ve seen me and my tech-forward compadres in a webinar or conference session - you know how this technology is developing, you know how fast it is developing, and you know the stakes.

You also know there are people in public media who are thinking daily about these issues the breakneck pace of the technological evolution means for public media. Just to name drop a few: Mikey at PBS, Erica at NPR, David in Sacramento, Nathalie in LA, Ernesto in SanFran, Natalie in SLC, Shane in Nashville, Jacqueline in Miami and many others.

That’s not to say that we can afford to take our foot off the accelerator and ride the clutch. But I left Palmer’s talk with a feeling of disconnect that I’ve decided is due to the fact that we’ve already started to figure this out.

Okay, on to the links.

Webinars and Tutorials for You

The 50+ Gaming Audience You’re Overlooking (Thursday, June 19, 1pET/10aPT)
What if your next big audience growth opportunity wasn’t another TV show or podcast – but a game?

In this session, Dr. Brittne Kakulla, senior insights manager at AARP, shares groundbreaking research on the 50+ gaming community – a rapidly growing, highly engaged audience that public media can’t afford to overlook. From Wordle to digital puzzles and beyond, gaming is already a major part of daily life for millions of Americans 50 and older – the same audience public media proudly serves.

Learn why older gamers are an untapped opportunity, what they want from game experiences, and how public media organizations can think differently about intergenerational play, content, engagement, and innovation for this key demographic. Whether you’re in marketing, content, community engagement, or strategy, this conversation will spark new ideas for reaching audiences in playful and powerful ways. Register now!

PBS Standards Webinar: APA’s Generative AI Best Practices Tool Kit (Wednesday, June 25, 1pET) Friend-of-the-newsletter, Talia Rosen, and her team are organizing this hands-on tour of a new generative AI tool kit published by the Archival Producers Alliance (APA). Archival producers Rachel Antell and Kenn Rabin will present the new GenAI Best Practices Tool Kit recently published by the APA through a guided tour of the resources, and they will answer audience questions about putting the tool kit into practice. You can learn more about the APA’s guidelines on the PBS Standards site. And you can register for the webinar here.

The Neuron Prompt Tips of the Day—May 2025 (Corey Noles - The Neuron) 
Key Line: "Supercharge your AI game with The Neuron’s May 2025 Prompt Tips of the Day. This month’s lineup features hands-on strategies for refining your Gemini prompts, generating vivid historical narratives, and wielding ChatGPT as a precision editor. Whether you're boosting productivity or pushing creative boundaries, these bite-sized tips deliver real-world impact—one prompt at a time."
Why It Matters: The Neuron is still one of my go-to sources for AI news. They are steeped in this stuff and I appreciate their curation of prompts. A quick skim of their list should give you a couple of new ideas to try.

AI & The Future of Work

Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd (Ethan Mollick - One Useful Thing)
Key Line: "My colleague Andrew Carton has shown that workers are not motivated to change by leadership statements about performance gains or bottom lines, they want clear and vivid images of what the future actually looks like: What will work be like in the future? Will efficiency gains be translated into layoffs or will they be used to grow the organization? How will workers be rewarded (or punished) for how they use AI? You don’t have to know the answer with certainty, but you should have a goal that you are working towards that you are willing to share."
Why It Matters: I will 100% cop to confirmation bias on this one. What Mollick has seen, writ-large, I see in our mission-driven corner of the media landscape. So, if you haven't developed the AI strategy for your organization, this is a good place to start.

Being honest about using AI at work makes people trust you less, research finds (Oliver Schilke & Martin Reimann - The Conversation) 
Key Line: "But there’s a caveat: If you’re using AI on the job, the cover-up may be worse than the crime. We found that quietly using AI can trigger the steepest decline in trust if others uncover it later. So being upfront may ultimately be a better policy."
Why It Matters: We're very much in a damned-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't moment with AI. So, this bit of research was not surprising to me. But the researchers ultimately land on the recommendation of "building a workplace where AI use is seen as normal, accepted and legitimate." As you saw with Mollick's piece (above), this isn't a correct path forward yet, but it seems like sensitivity and support are good values to help you find it.
Related: If, When and How to Communicate Journalistic Uses of AI to the Public from the Center for News, Technology & Innovation.
Also related: This report from Pew Research Center by Colleen McClain, Brian Kennedy, Jeffrey Gottfried, Monica Anderson, & Giancarlo Pasquini: How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence 

A white-collar bloodbath (Jim VandeHei & Mike Allen - Axios) 
Key Line: "Make no mistake: We've talked to scores of CEOs at companies of various sizes and across many industries. Every single one of them is working furiously to figure out when and how agents or other AI technology can displace human workers at scale. The second these technologies can operate at a human efficacy level, which could be six months to several years from now, companies will shift from humans to machines." Why It Matters: One point that I've been making consistently in my talks on AI this spring is that we need to help our colleagues and teammates get ready for the skills shift that is coming in the creation and distribution of mass media. But at the same time, I think that there could be a real opportunity for us in the realm of artisanal media created by humans for humans. That can still be done using AI tools, but we have to attract those with a dedication to craft. And I see real opportunity in attracting the very talent that seems to be edged out of the market. What better way to signal value to that "younger" audience we always seem to be chasing, than by employing them to make media that matters.
Related: I do think that the author Brian Merchant has a point when he reminds us that 'The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses,' meaning AI isn't going to cut your jobs. But a human CEO might.
Case In Point: This reporting from Sarah Scire at NiemanLab: Business Insider will lay off 21% of staff amid AI disruption and “extreme traffic drops” 
Also related: This recent study, reported by Neil Franklin in Workplace Insight: Gallup report suggests that firms and their employees are not on the same page when it comes to AI

AI & The Future of the Internet

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the future of search, AI agents, and selling Chrome (Nilay Patel - The Verge) 
Key Line: "This is the only platform where I think the actual platform is, over time, capable of creating, self-improving, and so on. In a way, we could have never talked about any other platform before, so that’s why I think it’s much more profound than the other platform shifts. It’ll allow people to create new things because, at each layer of the stack, there’s going to be profound improvements. And so I think that virtuous cycle you get in terms of how you can unleash this creative power to all of society, be it software engineers, be it creators — I think that is going to happen in a much more multiplicative way."
Why It Matters: Google dropped a head-spinning number of product announcements at their Google I/O event (the week of the PBS Annual Meeting). From the main stage in Atlanta, Ira's guest speaker, Shelly Palmer, encouraged everyone in the room to watch the keynote end-to-end. But this is, I think, even more important, as it gets to the why behind that keynote.
Related: Zvi Mowshowitz did a great summary of the Google keynote in his Google I/O Day post.
Also Related: Kyle Wiggers & Karyne Levy also summed up the event on TechCrunch in Google I/O 2025: Everything announced at this year’s developer conference 
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Watch the Google I/O 2025 keynote for yourself.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI can save the web, not destroy it (Nilay Patel - The Verge) 
Key Line: "And I think you really start to get into this mode where agents are doing things asynchronously for you. A lot of what happens right now in the current web model is everything happens synchronously. So you’re sort of sitting there like, “I’m staring at a browser right now. I may have a tool that I want to go buy on somebody’s Shopify storefront. My attention is focused on this particular task. I complete the transaction and then I move on to the next thing.” The interesting thing with agents is things are going to start happening asynchronously where you’re going to give an agent a task and it’s going to go do all of this stuff while your attention is elsewhere."
Why It Matters: The same week Google I/O happened, Microsoft Build also happened. The product announcements were less, by volume, but many were just as significant but a lot of the promotional weight was carried by their CTO. So, on the heels of that, The Verge's Decoder podcast parsed some the finer points with Kevin Scott. I found it useful to listen to this one back-to-back with the Sundar Pichai podcast; a good compare/contrast.
Related: Scott was also interviewed that week by Dan Shipper of Every’s Chain of Thought podcast: Kevin Scott on The Future of Programming, AI Agents, and Microsoft’s Big Bet on the Agentic Web 
Also Related: Microsoft adopts Google’s standard for linking up AI agents by the prolific Kyle Wiggers in TechCrunch.
Boring But Important: You’ll want to talk with your web dev team about Microsoft’s Introducing NLWeb: Bringing conversational interfaces directly to the web 
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Watch the Microsoft Build keynote for yourself (Scott comes on stage about an hour and 12 minutes in).
Cliff's Notes: CNET cuts the two hours down so you don't have to in Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote: Everything Revealed, in 14 Minutes 

Generative AI Video

Veo 3 can generate videos — and soundtracks to go along with them (Kyle Wiggers - TechCrunch) 
Key Line: '“For the first time, we’re emerging from the silent era of video generation,” Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, Google’s AI R&D division, said during a press briefing. “[You can give Veo 3] a prompt describing characters and an environment, and suggest dialogue with a description of how you want it to sound.”' Why It Matters: I had begun to despair of generative videos promise to upend visual communication in 2025. Certainly, Sora from OpenAI disappointed but folks were seemingly eking out some interesting experiments using Runway 4. Veo 3 puts us back squarely into WTAF territory, and has shifted my thinking about what is possible in 2025 and 2026.
Related: Tom May's "I've been watching Google Veo 3 videos, and they're genuinely terrifying" in Creative Bloq.
Also Related: Simon Wyndham's "Google Veo 3: Has AI generated video crossed the Rubicon - again?" in Redshark News.
Still Related: Allison Johnson's "Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator is a slop monger’s dream" in The Verge.
The Hard Questions: That we are even discussing Emanuel Maiberg’s question in 404 Media is worth reflection: Why Does Google’s New Veo 3 AI Video Generator Love This Dad Joke?
Downstream Effects: "Darren Aronofsky’s AI-Driven Studio Primordial Soup Inks Google DeepMind Partnership, First Film Project to Premiere at Tribeca Festival" reported by Todd Spangler in Variety.
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Read the blog post from Eli Collins, VP, Google DeepMind introducing Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and a new tool for filmmaking called Flow: "Fuel your creativity with new generative media models and tools".

📽️ Before you ask: yes, everything is AI here. (Lázló Gaál - X/Twitter) 
Key Line: “Welcome to a non-existent car show. Let’s see some opinions.”
Why It Matters: I like that they disclosed AI (albeit subtly) in the opening line. This was the punchline for my section on generative video in the talk I gave last week to PMBA about AI. The video isn’t perfect, but it gets a solid A- in my book. Of course, the key thing to note is that there's some judicious editing at play here. But behind every great producer is a brilliant editor. AI isn't changing that (yet).

📽️ I made this for $500 in Veo 3 credits in less than a day. (PJ Ace - Twitter/X) 
Key Line: "I used to shoot $500k pharmaceutical commercials….What’s the argument for spending $500K now?"
Why It Matters: Another example from Veo 3. Note that like the previous video, a lot of little details (like insignias on hats and text on patches or t-shirts) still don't make sense. But, again, this is likely the worst that generative video will ever be.

📽️ We Can Talk! (Ari Kuschnir - Twitter/X) 
Why It Matters: Yet another example where the editing makes all the difference in the world. Fun and upbeat, yes. But you can still see the seams, even if they aren't actually 'uncanny.'

AI Search & SEO

‘Search is going off a cliff’: CNN, BBC and Economist chiefs on future of news (Bron Maher - PressGazette) 
Key Line: 'Numerous publishers have expressed a concern that AI-enabled search services like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are diminishing their referral traffic because they answer user queries without them needing to click through to sources. Minton Beddoes continued: “What matters, I think right now, is if you get your subscribers to use your own properties, you’re in a good position… but in terms of getting new subscribers, search is going off a cliff.” In such a situation, she argued, “brand matters”. But it was also “important in this world to figure out how to become discoverable… “You’re right, AI is a huge opportunity. But you have to think about it in terms of: what do we need to do to make sure that tomorrow’s listeners and viewers and readers know about The Economist, know about CNN, know about the BBC and know that’s where you have to go? And that is going to be different than it is right now.”'
Why It Matters: Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist put it as well as I could. Looking at NPM's traffic for the last year, ChatGPT is slight but there is a distinct upward slope to the trend line. At the same time, the trend in discoverability of our site via search has also been on an upslope since we relaunched the site about 4 years ago (when the data reset). I'll watching to see if either of those trend lines show a dramatic change in 2025.
Related: And while we aren't seeing it at NPM yet, Sara Guaglione reports in Digiday that ChatGPT referral traffic to publishers’ sites has nearly doubled this year 
Also Related: Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online by Charlotte Tobitt in PressGazette.
Shots Fired: News Media Alliance Issues Statement on Google’s AI Mode, Calls It ‘Definition of Theft’ by Akash Dutta in Gadgets360.

Google is using content from publishers who “opt out” of other AI training to power AI Overviews (Andrew Deck - NiemanLab)
Key Line: "Currently, there is no way for publishers to use robots.txt to only block Google’s indexing for AI Overviews, and not general search. So Google’s statement confirms the only way for publishers to opt-out is to effectively block Google’s ability to rank their site in search results altogether."
Why It Matters: For most of the first part of this year I’ve been thinking worrying about the changes happening around web search and content discovery. This past month, that ‘Spidey sense’ has kicked into overdrive. The bit came to light a couple of weeks back during part of Google’s latest anti-trust trial. Taken in combination with Google’s announcements this past week at Google I/O (see above), we need to be rethinking our strategies now.

Other Things AI Related

U.S. Copyright Office has registered 1,000+ works enhanced by AI (Timothy Beck Werth - Mashable)
Key Line: 'Assistant General Counsel Jalyce Mangum said that the "Office has registered more than a thousand works where applicants have followed our guidance to disclose and disclaim AI-generated material." Crucially, Mangum said the office considers "whether AI is enhancing human expression or is the source of the expressive choices."'
Why It Matters: Nearly three years into the AI-era and we’re starting to finally get some clarity on how much AI is too much for a human to claim ownership. All things considered, when I comes to regulation, that’s actually pretty speedy.
Related: This OG of AI lawsuits has largely faded into the background (though I still like to dust it off for some of my AI presentations), but as Ryan Browne reports for CNBC, Getty is still fighting: Getty Images spending millions to battle a ‘world of rhetoric’ in AI suit, CEO says 

AI interfaces that aren’t chat (Hiten Shah - Twitter/X) 
Key Line: "The responses were thoughtful, wide-ranging, and honestly a bit ahead of where I expected things to be."
Why It Matters: This is a short piece that goes long on expanding how you might think about AI. How we abstract our world matters. When we wrote letters we communicated one way, when we texted via pre-Blackberry smartphones, we communicated another. Pondering if the chat interface wasn't the main interface for AI is a great thought experiment.

The Creator Economy

Peacock launched an accelerator for creators. Now it’s picking up their scripted shows. (Sam Gutelle - Tubefilter)
Key Line: "As part of that process, the program participants earned development deals with NBCUniversal and took advantage of guidance from development mentors. Now, four of the projects greenlit in that fashion are set to premiere on May 19 as part of an effort dubbed the Peacock Emerging Artist Series."
Why It Matters: At the PBS Annual Meeting we heard a good session on stations that were having some success with YouTube. And some stations have even started working with creators or local influencers. So, I’m intrigued by other experiments where traditional media is leaning in to the DIY aesthetic of creators.

And finally…

My 38th 'Hamlet' (inside Grand Theft Auto) is the first I've seen with flamethrowers (Bob Mondello - NPR) - And finally, I can’t wait to stream this.

Have a creative, productive week!