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Keep Your Wits and Skills About You

Welcome to the second week of January, where the situation in the US has degraded further, following the invasion of Minneapolis by armed ICE agents, who murdered 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Good, just one week ago, in cold blood. 

I know that because most of you are in the media, you’re acutely aware of the situation on the ground in Minnesota and the hateful turn our federal government continues to take.  Between Kristi Noem’s appearance in front of a podium with a Nazi slogan on it, reports that the White House is spending $100 million on pro-ICE influencers, and multiple government agencies using white nationalist songs, slogans, and imagery across platforms, the national mood is very bleak. 

I want to remind all of us to be very careful about what we consume and share on social media these days. There is plenty of AI-generated content circulating with fabricated views and angles of the murder of Renee Good and the events that are unfolding in Minneapolis, as well as other events going on around the country. 

For example, there’s a clip of Trump’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club yesterday that shows him weirdly slurring his words and talking very slowly. Commenters on the posts argue that it's one more indication of his cognitive decline and that the end is near. After seeing this post several times across different social media accounts, I decided to find the source material to verify it. 

I found that it’s a short clip taken out of context and does not show what Trump was actually saying immediately before or after that section. I found the AP feed of the actual speech, and if you scroll to around 37:40 in the video, you’ll see the section that was taken out of context, clipped, and shared on social media. If you watch it, you’ll find that Trump is doing his standard impression (which he does a lot) of President Biden giving a speech, not having some kind of medical issue on stage. 

Things are very, very, very precarious right now, so please, use your journalistic tools and smarts to verify everything you see and share. It’s incredibly crucial in this moment. Rage bait works on both sides of the aisle. 

What Caught My Eye This Week: The Future of Luxury is Human-Created, Not AI

I keep a close eye on both beauty and fashion industry trends because you often see clues about how our culture is changing in how luxury design and beauty trends shift. The message, after all, is frequently the medium, and trappings matter. 

This week, the luxury house, Hermès, relaunched its website and partnered with a French artist, Linda Merad, to do something surprisingly countercultural: create a completely hand-drawn and animated website.

In a world flooded with AI-generated content, Hermès is leaning hard into the idea that luxury = human-created, and I am 100% here for it. It aligns well with their brand, as most of their products are made in European factories by very skilled artisans, and,  it makes them stand out in the era of AI-slop.

Hermès’ move underscores one of the tenets I consistently return to when I think about the future of our work (journalism, writing, video, media, all of it) and AI: In the future, human-created media will have infinitely more value than AI slop.

And audience data supports this idea. Take this report from October, by the Reuters Institute and Oxford. As they found: “On average, only 12% [of those surveyed] are comfortable with news made entirely by AI; this rises to 21% with a ‘human in the loop’, 43% when a human leads with some AI help, and 62% for entirely human-made news (an increase of 4 percentage points since 2024). This gap can be found across demographics and countries.”

That tells me that humans still want (and value) human-created stories, ideas, drawings, videos, and media, and that will only become rarer and more valuable as AI continues to be more regularly deployed in the media. Luxury markets (especially those for $1000+ scarves), tend to be close to the bleeding edge of these kinds of changes, and Hermès is demonstrating that luxury is being human–a premium feature if you will. 

While there’s plenty to worry about and deeply consider around AI and its impact (environmental, cultural, political, etc.), I deeply believe the future will favor human-created and content over AI-generated content because, ultimately, humans value other humans.   

How will “being human” verification work? I think of it a lot like Twitter’s (RIP) old verification process: You get verified as a human through some form of identification, and your work is verified as non-AI. By being verified, your profile rises, because the humans consuming your content value your humanness. As a result, your work becomes more in demand and more valuable. 

If Hermès is right, the future of luxury and even the media itself is not artificial. It's unmistakably and verifiably human.

This Week in Six-Figure Journalism Jobs

This week, there are more than 30 jobs on the list.

Freelance work includes:

✍️ A couple of high-profile science outlets paying up to $2 per word are looking for pitches.

📽️  A social news outlet is looking for freelance videographers around the country

✈️ Pitch calls for a top-tier travel and luxury publication

Full-time includes work: 

💵 A content leadership role that pays more than $300k per year and is fully remote

📖 A financial leader looking for a content director, paying $130,000 per year, for remote work

📢 A climate energy platform seeking a comms director and paying $120,000 per year for remote work.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can jump right into the Freelance, Full-Time, and Dishonorable Mentions.

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