I ONCE shocked a therapist by telling him how many newspapers I had to look at: on my phone, there are the apps for six English and American daily papers, and four weeklies (the Mail and the Telegraph I only ever read on a proper computer), along with a Reuters feed, an X account (on the web, to avoid ads), and some other social networks.
I seem to have acquired a subscription to The Spectator, which I don’t read, as well as The Economist and The New Statesman, which I do. The London, New York, and Los Angeles reviews of books all get glanced at from time to time, and the LRB gets read almost entirely. Then there is The New Yorker, when I remember, and two nerdy sites: Wired and 404 Media. I read Rob Hutton’s sketch in The Critic every day, not just because it is good, but because I failed at the job myself once; so I know how difficult it is.
Almost all of this activity was needed to find stories that might provoke some thought for this column (and its predecessor, the Press column). But, ever since Trump, I have given up on the news. This isn’t entirely a declaration of despair: it’s just as much a means to avoid despair. I commend it. It’s not a Lenten observation, but a defence of sanity.
There are several things that you stop noticing when you submerge yourself into the great river of news, and then start noticing again when you pull your head above water and crawl, exhausted, on to the dry land of decent fiction.
The first is how little of the news is actually new, and how much of it is just redundant. This is obvious to everyone who listens to 24-hour rolling news — just not enough changes in the parts of the world that the media pay attention to; but, even on a daily basis, most days, nothing much changes. The stories worth reading are almost all long, slow ones, plucked when they are ripe. There will be occasional shocking and unpredicted days, such as President Trump’s public betrayal of Ukraine; but they are very infrequent, and the industry works as hard as possible to reduce novelty and to predict what ought to happen before it does.
The second is the sharp divide between news of the outside world and news of what is on screens. Of the 33 headlines on the front of the Mail Online as I write this, 17 are about showbiz figures or stories. I include the Royal Family in those figures: an attack on Meghan Markle’s latest TV series is given more prominence even than J. D. Vance insulting the British army. The Mail is an outlier: only three of its stories deal with politics at all. Most of the rest are picture-driven, and two are recycled PR for food chains.
But even the supposedly serious papers, with the exception of the FT, devote a great deal of space to stories about people who exist only on screen, and their fictional doings.
Increasingly, this kind of thing can be and will be written by AI — as almost all opinion pieces could be written already — and read by them, too. The one piece of new news that I have registered this week is that 25 per cent of corporate communications are now written by AIs.
So, I decided last week to check out something that AIs are meant to be good for — writing small useful programs to help you to work productively. In my case, that means little routines to speed the process of throwing words away. My fingers expect to be able to press control-shift-backspace and make the most recent sentence vanish in a trice. But how to do this when you’re typing in the Substack editor?
I asked Claude, supposedly the best AI for help with this, and got an answer that was fluent, elegant, and quite wrong. But it was good for me to have to think through Claude’s mistake. Its next version didn’t work either, but it used an idea that I hadn’t had. So, I tried that and got it wrong first time. Then I thought through my own mistake, and, finally, it worked as I’d imagined. The value of the AI turned out to be that it forced me to think for myself. You may object that all this faffing saved no time at all compared with deleting characters one by one. But at least I wasn’t following the news.
Correction: this column last week said: “By the standards of Silicon Valley, Professor John Naughton is a realist.” It should have said that “Dario Amodei is a realist.” The mistake was made in the editing of the column, not by Andrew Brown, and we apologise to him and to Professor Naughton for the error.
