Talking Points Memo

TPM is a mission-focused publication. We'd all like to make a bit more money because money lets you do stuff. But there are lots of ways to make more money that TPM eschews because they would go against our values. We care about doing good journalism and we care about being a good place to work.

Of late, there's a new value we've been talking about internally — and I have to admit it's not one I ever expected we'd have to be explicit s right, at TPM you can be 100% sure that a real, live human being wrote and reported the story you are reading or engaging with. We have a real human person who edits the podcast. We have more than one real human person who does design work and makes images. We even have real human beings who write the code that runs our website. After our real human people report the news and write the news, we have other real human people who edit the news. We have a section on the homepage called Livewire where some of our real-human-being employees curate interesting and important stories being published elsewhere so that you can read them.

Like I said, I never thought employing real carbon-based hominids would be a point of pride, a mark of distinction, something to hang our human hats on. But increasingly, this is the case. The very bizarre news startup The Messenger announced back in October that it was going to use AI to help avoid "bias," whatever that means. Matt Shuham, a real life human being who used to work at TPM, wrote about that effort for the Huffington Post. Someone at Sports Illustrated had the brilliant idea not just to publish articles written by AI, but to create fake people — fake supposed authors, with real-sounding names and real-looking photos — to throw the rest of real, live people off the scent. It didn't work. Big publishers like Axel Springer and even the Associated Press have inked deals with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

It's no secret that technology increasingly helps to construct our perception of reality. Even before AI, algorithms used by social platforms were playing an outsized role in determining what news and content we see online. There's no need to rehash the role the platforms played in the last couple elections. Well, it's 2024 and we have another "most important election" coming up, and this time in addition to algorithms distributing news, you may have to contend with algorithms creating the news. 
 

But not if you stick with TPM. We're big fans of people over here. We think this important political and cultural moment requires a human touch. So when you read a story, you can be confident a real life human person wrote it.