How AI Should Handle News, Politics, Medicine, and Mental Health — With Campbell Brown

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
How should AI models treat controversial information like politics and vaccines? We'll cover it all with media and tech veteran, Campbell Brown, right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk all about how AI models should cover controversial information. How should they answer questions about political candidates, about vaccines, about self-harm? We're going to do it with the perfect person here because Campbell Brown is joining us. She is the CEO of Forum AI, a new company tackling this challenge. Campbell, great to see you.

**Campbell Brown** (0:35)
Great to see you too, Alex. It's wonderful to be here.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:38)
Great to have you here. We go way back. You ran Meta's media department.

**Campbell Brown** (0:47)
Started off overseeing news.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:49)
Yes.

**Campbell Brown** (0:50)
Some challenges there.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:52)
Which is actually like kind of a perfect moment, because not only did you do that, you were an anchor at CNN and NBC. So you've seen this from the news side. You've seen it from the tech side. We're definitely going to get into sort of how AI models should treat controversial information, which is what you're working on at your company Forum AI.
But I felt that to start this conversation, I wanted to speak with you about another pressing problem that I see on the horizon, which is that there has definitely been this bubbling worry that as LLMs ingest publisher content, that the incentive to create that content is going to go away. And it started out as something of a theoretical problem, like maybe one day people will just get their information from large language models and then they won't go to websites. And more and more, it seems that the LLM products out there today, ChatGPTs, Anthropics, the bunch of challengers that are coming up after them, they will inevitably subsume all this information. And so I have this like, I feel kind of two ways about it. Like, I'm running a media company. I have long believed that you cannot depend on platform traffic to sustain you. We don't do any search engine optimization at Big Technology. But on the other side, it seems like there's going to be a black hole where like the financial incentive to create any content online is going to disappear for many, many people. And we're just going to have this information collapse.
And you're somebody again, who's like been on all sides of this. So I'm actually curious to hear where you think this is going.

**Campbell Brown** (2:41)
Yeah. I'm as worried as you are.
You know, my career, people sometimes say to me, your career is all over the place. You did this, and you went to Meta, and you were a journalist, and it doesn't make sense. It actually, this trajectory feels like it makes perfect sense to me right now because of the moment we're in. I tried to address some of these challenges when I was at Meta overseeing news. How do we work on business models with publishers in a way that improves the performance and outlook for a better partnership between the platforms and publishers? I don't think that really worked. And then as soon as Chat Should Be Tea was released, it was clear to me, I think, in that moment, it became clear that this is going to be how my kids get their news and information. This is the funnel through which it's going to flow. So what does that look like? How do we ensure the quality of information and that people like you are still doing their jobs and able to make a living to do their jobs and that that's what is feeding the models? I don't think we have a solution just yet. I think we're in a bit of a standoff between the labs and the model companies and the news publishers who are still doing traditional journalism. And coming to some place where that's not where we are now, which is, okay, some of the labs are doing some deals with some journalists to make sure they have the basic information they need to be able to address queries about the world. But what is the business model look like for AI and publishers going forward? And that hasn't been resolved. It's just there's, we're in a standoff right now. There's litigation.
Lots of people trying to be creative and how to think about it. There are companies, one that I am an investor in called Tollbit, that are trying to build marketplaces where you can purchase content based on use.