Casino Journalism (with Jonathan Reiss)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AI Skeptics podcast.

Today we have a special guest that I met in Occupy by a different name.

So I'm going to let him introduce himself.

Jonathan, go ahead.

Hi, I'm Jonathan Rees.

I had a checkered past on Wall Street and then via Occupy Wall Street where I did meet Kathy and so kind of suited him.

And now I am Associate Director of the Media and Democracy Project.

The Media and Democracy Project is a nonpartisan, all-volunteer civic organization fighting for a more informative, pro-democracy media.

We started as a bunch of people who were very passionate about these issues, various aspects of what's wrong with media and how it could be improved.

And we're now sort of building ourselves into an organization.

We work on various things, including press freedom, local journalism, media reform, regulatory issues.

We have a case against Fox and have been fighting with the FCC over that.

But today I want to talk about what we call casino journalism, which is the misuse of prediction markets by news organizations and what we can do about it.

And I'm going to hand it over to Tom to talk about prediction markets in general.

I just want to say that prediction markets aren't all that connected to AI, but I think that their effects on journalism, as we're going to talk about, has a lot in common with what's going on with AI.

I think there's just a huge number of commonalities.

So I feel like this is kind of setting the table for discussions I want to have in the future, then in your future, about how AI and journalism are interacting.

But anyway, Tom, kick it off with us for the first topic.