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Last week’s intro polemic about the impacts of AI on local media and businesses clearly resonated with a lot of you, resulting in lots of interest and complimentary feedback.

This is exciting, as I wasn’t entirely sure how expanding the usual Camden culture-led agenda into more esoteric tech waters might go down. The answer is that pretty much everyone is urgently fascinated, horrified, or a curious mixture of both in trying to get their heads around AI at the moment.

Well hold on to your hats.

In the last week alone, I’ve seen multiple examples of how fast many of these areas are now accelerating. These include:

💻 Fake ‘London history’ pages on Facebook with AI text and images containing multiple factual errors, (potentially created by malicious actors who use the comments to start political arguments). If AIs are scraping this type of content they will be becoming less accurate and trustworthy.

🏘️ An estate agent’s ‘area guide’ to Kentish Town featuring quite unbelievable AI slop masquerading as an SEO strategy, complete with painfully crap and inaccurate ‘tips’ and hilarious images of a fantasy high street. Even The Forum has been bizarrely reimagined!

📉 Journalists at the Mirror being given ‘page view targets’ on every story, thereby incentivising them to produce even more mass appeal clickbait headlines rather than meaningful or detailed reporting.

🚫 The brief but still threatened TikTok ban in the US demonstrating how shaky it is to build your audience/business on someone else’s platform (well-written newsletters being far superior, remember).

It’s already more of a hot mess out there than any of us can probably imagine, where now-quaint revelations about students using ChatGPT to cheat on homework from a year ago are proving to be the tip of a very big iceberg.

One reader (see the poll comments below) asked more about the AI agent that spits out all the theatre listings in Camden. Well, I created it myself in just a few minutes, using a free Google tool called Notebook LM. This week I also noticed, for the first time, that Google’s Gemini AI is providing listings info in Google search, threatening more traditional local what’s on guides, as the digital landscape changes at pace.

Talking of Notebook LM, I couldn’t resist asking it’s two synthetic AI podcast hosts to discuss last week’s edition of Camdenist. Robots talking to robots about me talking about them doing exactly that. It couldn’t get any more meta…but it does.

They laugh, joke and give some pretty decent insights on my points, even going off on tangents about creative uses for AI in bookshops and to improve traffic and air quality.

You really should give it a listen as it’s an equally fascinating and unsettling revelation as to what can now be created in a minute or two for free. It’s 13-minutes long, but you can skip through. SPOILER ALERT: the robots are not self aware, at least not just yet - but they sure sound it…

Remember, I’m here to help with your own comms and content if you are looking for ways to navigate this wild new media era. Reach out to: [email protected] 

Meanwhile, this week we were accepted onto the Barclays Eagle Labs Product Builder Programme with proposals for a Web3 ‘creative place platform’ to help solve some of the issues around local media, and how we can develop something digital that supports independent businesses and communities, rather than feed lies to them.

Over the next eight weeks you can follow our progress over on Camdenist’s sister title, The Wick, which covers the neighbourhoods in and around the Olympic Park. We’re asking a poll question each week on how you’d use such a service - here’s the first one.

📊 This week’s one-click poll

Do leave us a comment after voting too, as it’s great to hear your thoughts.

Last week’s results to the question: How do you approach AI tools in your workplace right now?

Embrace - excited to try things and see how AI can help us raise our game
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 38%

Fear - I worry about the tech disrupting what we do and who does it
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 27% 

Shrug - I've not seen AI do anything too impressive yet. It's all hype
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 35%

and some of your comments:

“I loved this week's newsletter. AI is about augmenting not replacing (at least in my opinion).”

“I own a rehearsal studio in Kentish Town - Ktown Studios - and its full of wonderful creative people. It makes me sad when I get sent countless emails offering free AI vocals programs and AI to make music. It’s a shame that the arts are being used as a playground for AI music companies who will use them to create soulless music as it means not having to pay musicians. Why can't AI replace dull jobs first, before taking away the pleasures in life like creating art.”

“Where can i get the AI agent that trawls all the local theatre? What app are you using, had no idea something like that existed.”

THIS WEEK

Coldplay’s AFFTF lights up boundless human creativity

The latest blockbuster 360 degree show at King’s Cross Lightroom burst onto its four-storey high screen on Wednesday night, at the world premiere of Coldplay’s A Film For The Future. It’s a visual accompaniment to their album Moon Music, made up from the individual unscripted work of 152 graphic artists from 45 countries, plus 79 fans submissions, too.

Sitting on the floor of the vast space, surrounded by many of the teams who had produced the visual work, it really felt like a repost to all the generative AI garbage, and a demonstration of how the tech can and should instead support and enable expanding the horizons of human creativity.

The film also provides a welcome jolt of optimism in the the current daily dystopian ‘drill baby drill’ political climate, and while Coldplay’s sentimental effervescence winds a fair few people up, they do the whole thing so incredibly well. The more cloying inclinations of some of the artists are also tempered by the quick edits between them all, so if the love hearts and rainbow-tinted earth horizons ever threaten to get a bit too much, you’re swiftly on to captivating shadow puppetry, wild acrobatics, landscape montages and layers of grainy home movie clips.

Coldplay have a proper Camden back story too, from way before going stratospheric with formative gigs at The Laurel Tree, Dublin Castle, Dingwalls and Bull & Gate, and on to recording their biggest hits at their studios in Gospel Oak, so the event is a bit of a homecoming, too (even if the band themselves are actually touring in India right now).

The whole montage is 44 minutes long and you can see it in full 360 degree glory on Thursday and Friday evenings until the end of February.

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