Only with the invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy did the masses start to get their information by text.

text.Those seeking to influence others put away their soapboxes and loudhailers and started writing pamphlets and articles instead.

Now there are signs that this five hundred-year trend towards text is sliding into reverse.

People everywhere are sounding the alarm about a decline in reading.

Parents struggle to cajole their children to pick up a book.

Professors despair that students can't finish reading lists.

And once they're adults and no longer nagged by teachers or parents, many people stop reading altogether, relaxing not with a paperback, but a vertical video feed.

There's no country in history that's ever even been, never been anything like it, what's happening in our country.

Tom Wainwright is our media editor.

It features The Cure from Britain, Addison Rae from America, Jennie from Blackpink, which is from South Korea, and loads of other worldwide acts from Australia's Folk Bitch trio to the Pili Pili Girls of Tanzania.

But if you eavesdrop on the private playlists of Danish festival-goers, you might hear a more local soundtrack.

The country's most streamed song of last year, "Hele Vejen" or All The Way, was by Omar and Umlæu, a pair of Danish artists.

And in fact, nine of the top 10 tracks in Denmark in 2025 were by Danes belting out lyrics in Danish.

[record scratching] It might seem surprising that in a world of global stars, a country of just 6 million people, many of them fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music.

And until fairly recently, they didn't.

[instrumental music]

How does this work?

work?Well, the ads just pop up i- in the conversation, and they look much like ads that you get when you do a Google search.

They're clearly labeled as ads, and it will say, "Click here to buy such and such." But they vary a little bit by platform.

So Google, in its AI mode, where it's just experimenting with ads at the moment, when it does show an ad, it tends to show the ad with its first response to your first question within the conversation.

So it's a bit like a search ad really.

ChatGPT is interestingly different.

It tends to wait longer.

Um, Tom, if this is a, a new market essentially, how big could it become?

How does this work?

Well, the ads just pop up i- in the conversation, and they look much like ads that you get when you do a Google search.

They're clearly labeled as ads, and it will say, "Click here to buy such and such." But they vary a little bit by platform.

So Google, in its AI mode, where it's just experimenting with ads at the moment, when it does show an ad, it tends to show the ad with its first response to your first question within the conversation, so it's a bit like a search ad really.

ChatGPT is interestingly different.

It tends to wait longer, so nearly a third of the ads that it has been showing so far during its experiments have come after the 10th turn in the conversation.

So it's a bit like a salesman biding their time until they figure out exactly what the consumer might want before making their pitch.

Um, Tom, if this is a, a new market, essentially, how big could it become?

And so that's the novel legal approach here to prove something more, I guess, about the design than the content.

That's exactly right.

And I think this is the interesting point here.

People have been launching these lawsuits against social networks for years and years, and they haven't really got anywhere, because in the past they focused on the content that these platforms are publishing.

So there was a case in twenty twenty-three, for example, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the States, where Twitter was accused of hosting terrorist material on its network.

And the social networks have never really been found liable for this because there's a legal detail called Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act, which basically exempts them from liability for any content published on their platforms.

And without this, it would essentially be impossible to operate an open social network with millions of users if you were liable for everything that they posted.

Perhaps all the thousands of people behind her, though.

And so that's the novel legal approach here to prove something more, I guess, about the design than the content.

That's exactly right, and I think this is the interesting point here.

People have been launching these lawsuits against social networks for years and years, and they haven't really got anywhere because in the past, they focused on the content that these platforms are publishing.

So there was a case in twenty twenty-three, for example, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the States, where Twitter was accused of hosting terrorist material on its network.

And the social networks have never really been found liable for this because there's a legal detail called Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act, which basically exempts them from liability for any content published on their platforms.

And without this, it would essentially be impossible to operate an open social network with millions of users if you were liable for everything that they posted.

This legal case took a different approach.

Perhaps all the thousands of people behind her, though.

So what's the general perception of those bans? What do people in different countries actually think about the idea of social media bans?

Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more popular policy than this.

[chuckles] I mean, it's just extraordinary.

There's huge support for this among adults pretty much all over the world.

I saw one series of polls done by Ipsos last year.

They did questioning in something like 40 countries, and in every single one, there was a majority in favor of banning under 16s from using social media.

I looked down in a bit more detail at one of the polls here in the UK, and it's a policy which has support among people of all ages, of both sexes, people who lean left, people who lean right.

So then what can be done, Tom? How can social media be made a more suitable place for teens to spend their time?

So what's the general perception of those bans? What do people in different countries actually think about the idea of social media bans?

Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more popular policy than this.

[chuckles] I mean, it's just extraordinary.

There's huge support for this among adults pretty much all over the world.

I saw one series of polls done by Ipsos last year.

They did questioning in something like 40 countries, and in every single one, there was a majority in favor of banning under 16s from using social media.

I looked down in a bit more detail at one of the polls here in the UK, and it's a policy which has support among people of all ages, of both sexes, people who lean left, people who lean right.

So then what can be done, Tom? How can social media be made a more suitable place for teens to spend their time?

Well, that's just finding different shops to sell your wares in, but how are the wares changing?

If you think back a few years to what people would've considered a absolutely archetypal podcast, people were really thinking about long-form narrative series, things like Serial, for example, maybe Slow Burn, that kind of thing.

Now, I think if you picture in your mind's eye the kind of typical podcast, I think a lot of people would imagine something more like The Joe Rogan show or maybe New Heights with Travis Kelce and his brother.

In other words, famous people talking to other famous people on a sofa.

It's become a lot more about interview shows, and I think the main reason for this is that doing the video to go along with those shows is just so much easier and cheaper.

If you're doing an interview program, switching on a camera to just watch the people chatting is very easy, very cheap.

If you're doing long-form narrative investigative show, something like Serial, coming up with video backing for that whole series is a really big, expensive undertaking.

I listen to podcasts while cooking or, uh, going on a walk or what have you.

And coming onto how it's being used in schools, what does AI-boosted education look like at the moment?

moment?Well, it's changing quite quickly.

A couple of years ago, there were more schools in America that banned the use of AI than permitted it, whereas now its use has become pretty standard across the US, and the same is true in most rich countries.

It's changing all kinds of things.

So teachers are using it, first of all, to prepare for lessons.

Your kids are likely now to get more personalized homework with worksheets, with examples more relevant to them or tailored to their own level.

And some children are even being taught directly using AI.

But those sorts of top line dangers of what generative AI can suggest when that is not a good idea in one way or another is not all of the risk this presents if it's going to be so prevalent, so ubiquitous in kids' lives.

You're talking about changes on the demand side, but what about changes going on on the supply side, in particular with AI, which we know to be excellent at coding at the moment?

Yeah, I think a lot of people in the games business are optimistic about the impact of AI when it comes to reducing their costs because making a video game is unbelievably labor-intensive.

We've heard a lot about how it could change Hollywood, but the average triple A video game, that's the kind of highest quality video game, is even more expensive and takes even longer to make than a lot of Hollywood movies do.

If you look at the new Grand Theft Auto game, people reckon that the budget for that game could be over a billion dollars, and it's been in development for more than a decade.

So anything that can reduce the time spent and the money spent making these games is gonna be a huge help, and developers, I think, hope that AI could help them to do that.

They also hope that AI could introduce new kinds of gaming experiences, and there have been some tentative experiments here.

Fortnite, for example, released a Darth Vader character that can talk to gamers.

Notwithstanding that, though, you're describing a scenario in which it seems likely the games industry is gonna get out of its slump in 2026 with, I guess, some help from Grand Theft Auto.

A photo of a fluffy black cat sitting on a windowsill looking out at the rain in the garden.

Then came image slop, and people used AI image generators to make images of things like Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket.

And then there was audio slop, which has been invading playlists on platforms like Spotify.

In the last year, Spotify has removed 75 million tracks from its platform, complaining that AI has made it easier for people to push slop into the audio ecosystem.

So slop is everywhere.

I think it's unfair to call all AI content slop.

Some of it's funny.

I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us.

Why is it the target of so much scrutiny?

scrutiny?It's a really interesting case, and I think it comes down to the unique way that the BBC is funded.

It's funded by this thing called the license fee, which is a kind of pseudo tax really on nearly every household in the UK.

And because of the fact that everybody in the UK more or less has to pay for the BBC, the BBC has an obligation to produce coverage which reflects the UK and which keeps more or less everybody happy.

And of course, the difficulty is when you're trying to keep everybody happy, you very often end up making no one all that happy.

Everybody has some criticism of the BBC.

It seems sometimes half the UK think it's too right-wing, half the UK think it's too left-wing.

So what happens next?

Does it matter if older people are spending a lot of time on devices?

I think it's possible for anybody to overdo it, and what's interesting is that there are now more and more surveys focused on older people's use of screens.

There's long been worry about children and these habits, but now in some parts of the world, the focus is really moving to the other end of the age spectrum.

So in South Korea, for example, where they have very high rates of mobile phone use, there was a survey recently which showed that 15% of 60-something-year-olds were at risk of phone addiction.

There've been studies in China linking phone use to worse sleep in the over 60s.

There was a study in Japan showing that screen time was associated with less physical activity among the elderly.

All of these studies come with their caveats, so there's always a chicken-and-egg question.

And you said there were some benefits.

Does it matter if older people are spending a lot of time on devices?

I think it's possible for anybody to overdo it, and what's interesting is that there are now more and more surveys focused on older people's use of screens.

There's long been worry about children and these habits, but now in some parts of the world, the focus is really moving to the other end of the age spectrum.

So in South Korea, for example, where they have very high rates of mobile phone use, there was a survey recently which showed that 15% of 60-something-year-olds were at risk of phone addiction.

There've been studies in China linking phone use to worse sleep in the over 60s.

There was a study in Japan showing that screen time was associated with less physical activity among the elderly.

All of these studies come with their caveats, so there's always a chicken and egg question.

And you said there were some benefits

Is this game washing?

washing?It could be.

I mean, I think this is a really interesting side of it.

Obviously, they say this isn't part of the plan, but gaming is becoming a really important media business.

A- as we mentioned, it's already bigger than cinema, than streaming, than music.

So if you control the video games business or large chunks of it, you are gonna have some pretty serious soft power, if you like.

I think Saudi Arabia also sees an opportunity to project a different kind of image and to perhaps project a bit more of the region's culture.

Tom, how will this change the games themselves?

Why is it so popular with investors?

It does present a bit of a puzzle.

If we look at the two businesses in turn, let's start with Fox, which is the bigger of the two.

It's worth about $24 billion at the moment, and its main business is American broadcast and cable TV, which of course in recent years have not had a good time.

Streamers like Netflix have come along and taken their audience.

The proportion of homes in America with pay TV has fallen over the last 15 years from nearly 90% to barely 50%.

So it's surprising that any company that specializes in these areas is doing so well.

So even if the core businesses are doing surprisingly well, as you say, what about the sibling rivalry? Couldn't that still derail things?

But what's the measure for what matters and what doesn't?

Well, it's interesting that what they're really trying to do is forecast which misinformation claims are going to do the most damage.

And so they might look at a claim and start by thinking, for example, "Well, are enough people going to believe this claim for it to have a bad effect?" And there, it depends rather what the claim is.

Because if it's something like a, a piece of misinformation that's aiming to swing an election result, you need a lot of people to believe it in order for it to really do anything.

If, on the other hand, it's something like a fake medical cure, for example, you might only need one person to believe it in order to do themself serious harm.

So, uh, there's the question of, will enough people believe it? Then they ask themselves, do those people who might believe this incorrect information have any capacity to actually act on it? So, for example, you might be misled about the real origins of COVID-19, whether it was born in a laboratory or a, a market or whatever, but there's not much you can actually do about it immediately if you're wrong about this.

So, things where people don't have the capacity to act could be considered lower priority than those where they do.

And I suppose of that, some of it is not only not very harmful but genuinely harmless.