If the web browser is the interface of the internet today, how will we interact in the AI future? With chatbots, AI summarization apps and voice assistants, publishers are data fodder for the omniscient computer brain to answer user questions with precisely what they want to know. How will publishers adapt to these new interfaces where their brands fade into the background?

Our AI Real Talk panel discussed these questions. Watch their discussion on YouTube:

​Speakers

​Phoebe Connelly is the senior editor for AI Strategy and Innovation at The Washington Post. Connelly was previously the head of Next Generation Audience Development, an experimental team that helped accelerate the acquisition of younger and more diverse audiences through new products, practices and partnerships. Prior to that role, Connelly was the deputy director of video at the Post where she oversaw daily news coverage, interactive storytelling and emerging video products. Connelly joined The Post in 2013 from Yahoo! News and The American Prospect. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Awl, NPR and the Guardian.

​Linus Lee works on AI products at Notion, a flexible collaborative workspace tool for docs, wikis, notes and projects. He has spent the last few years prototyping new kinds of tools for thought and software interfaces for creation, like a canvas for exploring the latent space of generative models and writing tools where ideas connect themselves. His current work focuses on rich AI-based knowledge tools and applications of AI interpretability research in user interfaces for AI.

​Matt Karolian is vice president of platforms and R&D and has held several other positions at The Boston Globe, including director of new initiatives and director of audience engagement. Matt was a 2018 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where he studied the impact of AI on news, media and publishing — before it was cool. He now teaches a class focused on the intersection of business, technology and journalism at HarvardEx.

​Marcel Molina is the co-founder and CTO of Particle, an AI-powered news aggregator that helps you understand more, faster. Before Particle, he was an early engineer at Twitter (and a Lit major before that!), where he was fortunate to work on many of its foundations such as Retweet, Notifications, Conversations, Lists and follower analytics, as well as the systems underlying them. He also designed and built manufacturing execution systems at Tesla that were adopted across Gigafactories worldwide.

​Ariane Bernard is a product leader and entrepreneur with a specialty in content management and data products - CMS, subscription & eCommerce, data and AI. She’s worked across all sizes of companies: as the founder and CEO of a venture-backed startup, internationally as the chief digital officer at Le Parisien (LVMH), in scale-ups as the product lead for editorial products at Taboola; and in large, mature corporate environment in her 14 years at The New York Times including working on the CMS team. She is the founder of Upsides Labs, a strategy advisory and dev studio oriented at publishers and e-commerce companies in New York City.

About AI Real Talk

What are the potential benefits, risks, and ethical considerations of AI in journalism and across the media landscape? In a fast -paced, constantly evolving technology landscape, what are the latest provocative and timely issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and journalism?

To discuss these topics, join Hacks/Hackers for AI Real Talk, a series of insightful, hype-free, and brutally honest discussions with industry experts and thought leaders that aims to help journalists and others navigate this new era in technology.