News or noise? The competing visions for journalism in an AI-mediated society

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, his dismantling of its content moderation processes, his frequent vilification of legacy media and his use of the platform to support Donald Trump in the US presidential election have made him a uniquely controversial figure in the global information ecosystem. This panel will attempt to shine new light on Musk’s increasingly pivotal role in the media environment with a serious discussion of two of his core arguments about news media. His first argument is about the value of unrestricted free speech in the era of AI, constrained only by explicit legal prohibition – a libertarian view recently critiqued in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus. His second, and closely related, argument is that social networks and AI can replace journalists entirely – an argument that he has implemented as operating products on the X platform in the form of AI-reported ‘X Stories’, crowdsourced fact-checking and in the training of X.ai’s Grok as a “maximally truth-seeking” large language model. These arguments, funded by tens of billions of dollars and executed by some of the world’s top technical talent, should be taken seriously by journalists. This panel will begin with a short overview of Musk’s media activities and then examine these arguments on their merits, including their potential implications for journalism in an AI-mediated information ecosystem. The session will conclude with a short period of audience engagement.