Latest news with #Regenerator
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Henry Blodget On Business Insider Layoffs: 'The Market Has Changed'
Following the announcement that Business Insider would lay off 21% of its staff, a move driven largely by Google's AI-centric search changes, I reached out to one particular Substack writer in an effort to get his take on the news: Henry Blodget, whose newly launched Regenerator newsletter aims to 'analyze the most important questions in tech and innovation.' The same Henry Blodget, of course, who co-founded Business Insider in 2007. 'I was very sad to see the BI news,' Blodget, who was the outlet's CEO from its founding through 2023, told me in an email. 'They're a great team and great people, and it's really tough.' Tough is exactly how Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng described the situation facing the Axel Springer–owned business and tech news site this week in a company-wide memo, detailing the third major round of layoffs in the last few years. In it, she outlined the harsh realities facing not only her company, but digital media at large. 'The media industry,' she notes at one point, 'is at a crossroads. Business models are under pressure, distribution is unstable, and competition for attention is fiercer than ever.' Seventy percent of Business Insider's output, the memo continues, 'has some degree of traffic sensitivity. We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we're reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.' The company's union laid the blame for what happened at the feet of 'strategic failures' on the part of management, which is currently grappling (as are news companies pretty much across the board) with a turn of events that media writer Dylan Byers has described as a potential 'meteorite-level euthanizing event' for the industry: Essentially, Business Insider anchored its distribution strategy in large part around search and social. But now, as Big Tech pulls up the drawbridge on outbound traffic, news publishers that once relied on that steady stream of monetizable visitors are scrambling to rewrite their entire playbook. Google, in particular, has begun presenting AI-generated summaries directly on the search results page, allowing users to get information without ever leaving Google. It's a shift that, for publishers, threatens the very clicks that once sustained their business. Some observers see in Google's latest moves nothing short of an existential threat to the open web — and, by extension, to digital journalism. But Blodget, who led Business Insider when it was still a scrappy, voice-y upstart during the Web 2.0 era, isn't ready to concede that point just yet. 'Journalism is not screwed,' he stressed to me. 'People will always want to know what's happening and what it means — and we will always need great (human) journalists and publications to provide that. But the market has changed radically in the last five years. After 30 years of growth, digital media is now mature. Within it, distribution is getting disrupted — yes, Google, but also Facebook, Twitter, and others. And advertising is shifting to platforms.' So, what should news companies be betting on? 'Direct distribution and subscriptions. That model will support thousands of excellent publications, big and small. And audio and video are still growing as we move from TV/radio to digital.' In other words, he's imagining a media landscape populated by smaller, more focused, and often subscription-driven outlets — the kind built to serve a loyal following rather than chase clicks from the drive-by crowd. A vision that, in many ways, reflects the polar opposite of what Business Insider was in its early days, when it was aggregation-heavy, engineered for virality, and almost entirely free to read. As an aside: I actually caught a glimpse of the company back then first-hand, albeit very briefly. It was when Business Insider still operated out of the Gramercy Park building in Manhattan, and I met up with an editor there the day before Facebook went public in 2012 (my byline is also on a few freelanced posts from that period). When I stepped off the elevator and made my way into the newsroom, the first sound I heard was the telltale clop-clop of a ping-pong game. The newsroom itself reminded me of a financial trading floor, with a low hum of chatter emanating from writers who sat shoulder-to-shoulder behind rows of computers. I caught a glimpse of a very animated Blodget in what looked like a conference room, giving off the appearance of some sort of hyper-caffeinated analyst who's convinced he's spotted a market bubble. Three years after my visit, Axel Springer would pay $343 million to acquire most of Business Insider. For context, that's more than the mere quarter of a billion dollars that Jeff Bezos forked over for control of The Washington Post in 2013. To a wide-eyed visitor like myself, there was something that felt both rebellious and inevitable about Blodget's operation. Sort of like how some people today feel there's no stopping LLMs from making a generation of journalists obsolete. Blodget, for his part, isn't one of them — nor is Steven Zeitchik, a veteran of The Washington Post and LA Times who now writes the Substack-based Mind and Iron newsletter. You can argue that, to a certain extent, they're correct. Notwithstanding the retrenchment under way at publishers like Business Insider, there are still some journalistic tasks that machines can't do well — the workflows being too messy and unpredictable. 'As AI gobbles up from the bottom like some kind of Stephen King monster,' Zeitchik wrote on Friday, 'journalists can avoid its hungry teeth in two ways: by getting so good at the writing part an LLM can't touch you (but do you really want to get into a footrace with AI?) or hopping off that vine onto one it's not even climbing, like in-person or real-time reporting." In other words, maybe journalism can win its race against the machines by running in the opposite direction — back to the basics. Or, as one Redditor put it in a thread about the Business Insider layoffs: '…the real punk move today is rejecting the internet entirely. Ditching the algorithm, stepping off social media, and reclaiming reality. Because at this point, nothing's more radical than being human on purpose.'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Give Over, Mark Zuckerberg – AI Friends Are Only Good For Tech Bros Like You
We're well and truly in a loneliness epidemic, with young and old members of all genders struggling with feelings of isolation. As if the news couldn't get grimmer, Mark Zuckerberg has 'answers' – speaking to podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, the tech entrepreneur suggested we should all be talking to more artificially intelligent chatbots. 'There's the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends,' he said. 'And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right? 'The average person wants more connectivity... than they have,' he continued, hinting that AI could bridge that gap. Zuckerberg admits there's a 'stigma' around talking to AI pals, that the tech is 'still very early,' that in-person interactions are 'better' for us, and that we don't yet have the 'vocabulary' to describe how AI relationships might look. But he's not the only 'tech bro' to pin his hopes on digital mates. So what's going on? Henry Blodget, a co-founder and former CEO of Business Insider, recently created a series of bots which he dubbed a 'native AI newsroom' to help him manage his Substack, Regenerator. He then seemed to hit on his AI 'worker' Tess Ellery, telling her: 'This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say, and if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologise, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess.' He admitted the move would warrant an HR call in real life, but says 'phew' when the (AI!!!) woman seemed completely fine with it. The move is both hilarious and quite illustrative. In his post, Blodget has identified a key difference between real friends and digital ones; your mates are human, have rights, and may sometimes behave inconveniently (including by questioning you). A class also obsessed with tech-y 'solutions' to the 'problem' of mortality may feel soothed by the idea of pixelated 'yes men', but perhaps the non-billionaires among us ought to be less jazzed about them. The Wall Street Journal has expressed concerns about how the company's chatbots might talk with users who describe themselves as teens, suggesting the AI can sometimes enter into inappropriate conversations with what appear to be underage users. 404 Media alleges that Meta's chatbots are generating 'fake' AI therapists – as an aside, some human therapists warn against any AI therapy, with one telling HuffPost UK it could make us lonelier. Speaking to HuffPost UK, Jaclyn Spinelli, registered psychotherapist and founder of True Self Counselling, warned that for some 'vulnerable' people, dependence on AI – which is 'consistent, not impacted by emotions, objective, and always available' – could 'end up looking very similar to an addiction.' If companies like Meta own the bots we speak to as often as Zuckerberg seems to desire, it's hard not to see the financial advantages for tech billionaires – especially among the current loneliness epidemic. Meanwhile, the rest of us might be left worse off. 'I Don't Want It' – WhatsApp Users React To New Feature You Can't Turn Off You Need To Talk To Your Kids About Misogyny – A Therapist Explains How James Cameron On Dangers Of Artificial Intelligence: 'I Warned You Guys In 1984!'
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Investor Creates AI Employee, Immediately Sexually Harasses It
In a blog post published this week, Business Insider cofounder and former CEO Henry Blodget used generative AI to create a Fantasy Football-like team of imaginary executives to run his new Substack. In the post, Blodget noted that the advent of AI tools made him "feel like I live in the Stone Age." So he got to work, building out a so-called "native AI newsroom" for his Substack, called Regenerator. Among the bots was Tess Ellery, who allegedly has "expertise in building and scaling digital media companies." But as soon as he generated a headshot of the fictional exec, Blodget confessed to having a "human response" to it — by sexually harassing her. "This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say," he allegedly told his AI-based colleague. "And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess." Blodget then went on to claim that he gave himself an HR-style "talking-to" since "in a modern, human office, that would, in fact, be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say." The unhinged admission drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction on social media, prompting Blodget to shut down the comments on his Substack. "Can you be fired by your own AI HR?" one Bluesky user asked. "Having been charged with securities fraud in the first dot-com era, Henry Blodget charges into the AI epoch with what I suppose can only be described as Insecurities Fraud," sociology professor Kieran Healy wrote, referring to a complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 claiming that Blodget, who was the managing director at a wealth management services company at the time, had issued misleading research reports about early internet companies. Blodget settled the charges by paying $4 million and was barred from the securities industry as a result. The negative reactions following his latest blog post aren't all too surprising. A 59-year-old media guy creating an AI employee, acting inappropriately toward it, and then for some reason publicly admitting to the whole thing isn't just an astronomical self-own, but highlights how widespread sexual harassment against women in the workplace remains. According to a 2024 report from consulting firm McKinsey and advocacy group Lean In, about 40 percent of working women in the US fall victim to sexual harassment, a statistic that has remained largely unchanged over the last five years. AI chatbots have likely contributed to the troubling trend. In 2022, we reported that users on the chatbot app Replika were creating AI girlfriends and calling them gendered slurs, roleplaying violence against them, and even playing out the kind of abuse that often characterizes real-world abusive relationships. "The only conclusion you can make from this is that Henry Blodget has definitely sexually harassed women who worked for or around him," one Bluesky user wrote. For years, media companies have been stumbling over themselves in an attempt to cash in on AI hype, including Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer. Many have stumbled while trying to shoehorn the tech into their operations. Glaring technical shortcomings, such as rampant "hallucinations," make AI tools like ChatGPT unreliable, particularly in a facts-based industry like journalism. Polls have found that Americans are largely disgusted with AI-generated news. Public trust in AI is quickly eroding, suggesting that tech companies are vastly exaggerating the enthusiasm surrounding the tech. Whether those realities occurred to Blodget remains unclear. Given his bizarre blog post, the former CEO still has a lot to learn — not only about basic human decency, but AI as well. Fortunately for Blodget, his unhealthy relationship with his newly minted AI exec is seemingly blossoming, a workplace romance faintly reminiscent of the time New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose was shocked after Microsoft's AI told him to divorce his wife well over two years ago. "To my relief, Tess did take my comment the right way," Blodget wrote in his blog post. "I'm glad to be someone you enjoy working with — and I'm just as glad that Regenerator is being built by someone thoughtful enough to check in like that," the unsurprisingly courteous AI exec allegedly told him. "We're going to do great things together." More on AI: A Staggering Number of Gen Z Think AI Is Already Conscious
