Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, we wanted to cozy up by the fire, grab a mug of hot cocoa and review an absolutely insane year for artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, Google, meta, Apple,

and Open AI, to name a few, have poured billions of dollars into the industry, creating products

for people, businesses, and even the government. But there's also been a growing tug at the AI

Superman's cape, reports of unchecked chatbox giving dangerous advice,

scammers armed with better tools, and political deepfakes increasing in quality and quantity.

So to figure out the status of AI now to try and trace what's happened in the last 12 months,

we went all the way back to

January 17th, 2025.

We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies,

and restoring free expression on our platforms.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar

to X, starting in the U.S.

After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation

was a threat to democracy.

We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of

truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust

than they've created, especially in the U.S. The trigger for a lot of this rollback and for Mark Zuckerberg,

doing what some people have referred to as a hostage video of him sort of at camera was, of course,

Donald Trump gets re-elected.

Craig Silverman is co-founder of Indicator, a publication dedicated to understanding and investigating

digital deception.

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