Hi everyone,

How’s it going? A few significant things happened this week, including the 2025 Met Gala in New York (here’s a nice look at Black Dandyism in the context of this year’s theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style). There’s a potential war situation between India and Pakistan (gulp), and then the latest Trump karate chop: tariffs on non-US made films (listen or watch this recent episode of The Rest is Entertainment on that, if you’re interested in that subject).

In good news, in the UK that ever-present subject of the weather might make some happy people here, with the sun likely out a fair bit. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to go through in the links below, so without further ado - skip below and enjoy your weekends!

Anjali

Moby Relaunches Free Music Library For Creatives - With 500 New Tracks (3-min read)

When ChatGPT Broke An Entire Field - An Oral History (32-min read)

Google Has Launched A New Film & TV Production Wing (2-min read)

Media & Machines: Why Every Empire Will Be Half-Media, Half-Machine (8-min read)

People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fuelled Spiritual Fantasies (14-min read)

The Popular Alternative: The State of A24 (27-min read)

Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War On The Entire Advertising Industry (4-min read)

The AI Slop Presidency (7-min read)

Deleting My Podcast Wiped My Publication (4-min read)

Isle of Any’s Coinbase Campaign Is Meant To Mess Up your TV (1-min watch)

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Moby Relaunches Free Music Library For Creatives - With 500 New Tracks (3-min read)
Neat new resource for creatives who work with music: Moby has relaunched Mobygratis, the platform he originally launched in 2005, with 500 new tracks ‘all available in MP3, WAV, and multitrack formats, making them easier to work with’. The best part? They really are free, there is no hidden agenda. Which is refreshing.

When ChatGPT Broke An Entire Field - An Oral History (32-min read)
This is a long read, but what I love about it is that it is in the oral history format - which means lots of quotes, some context, and a gradually clearer image formed in your mind of what Natural Language Processing has meant to people working within the field, as ChatGPT became bigger and more powerful as a technology. It feels like you’re listening in on a private roundtable discussion. And you learn a lot about the evolution of AI in the process.

Google Has Launched A New Film & TV Production Wing (2-min read)
After the closure of YouTube Originals, which ran for 6 years from 2016 to 2022, Google has now re-entered the media business with a division called 100 Zeros. It’s existed for a short while already, being one of the backers of recent indie horror film ‘Cuckoo’. The goal is reported to be to make projects that can be sold to streamers like Netflix. This is effectively a whole brand-backed studio, and it is likely to explore Google’s own technology in productions, but we’ll see how they evolve.

Media & Machines: Why Every Empire Will Be Half-Media, Half-Machine (8-min read)
This is an interesting exploration of the idea of what media and attention might morph into in the future, given the increasing prevalence of AI. Read it with the other AI-related posts in this newsletter and it sort of feels like a picture is emerging. As Anu Atluru says: “We build AI to elevate humanity — to cure, decode, transcend. Yet like all mortal creations, it bends toward what's rewarded: commerce, companionship, cachet. We call this 'progress'— but is it acceleration toward greater civilization, or just a new Facebook? Is OpenAI just another FAANG-shaped god for the ‘new’ era? The answer is either yes, or yes and.”

People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fuelled Spiritual Fantasies (14-min read)
This is a really spooky read, talking of AI, sentience and the question of who has responsibility for content from bots that can seriously affect people’s lives. In this Rolling Stone story, we learn about how ‘ChatGPT-induced psychosis’ is causing relationships to fracture by preying on people with psychological issues: “…people with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues,” including what might be recognized as grandiose delusions in clinical sense, “now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions.”

The Popular Alternative: The State of A24 (27-min read)
Today does seem to be heavy on long reads, but I wouldn’t include it if I didn’t think it was truly worth reading. This is a great unpacking of what makes media and entertainment company A24 so interesting as a brand and as a startup. Read about the positioning and advantages A24 has compared to the big Hollywood studios, and why it will be relevant for a while yet: “A24 isn’t necessarily Disney in part because Disney still exists. No matter which tactics or outlooks the two companies share, no matter the swings and misses, no matter how big it gets or how misguided their expansion, part of A24’s brand is being the alternative. And as long as the industry careens toward conglomeration, the privatization of film libraries, and the execution of entire productions for tax write-offs, A24 will be telling a very technical, but easily defended truth.”

Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War On The Entire Advertising Industry (4-min read)
Well, talk about marking your own homework. As The Verge’s Nilay Patel says, “I’ve never heard anyone pull the thread all the way to “connect us to your bank account and read the results we spit out,” which would basically wipe out the entire ad industry as we know it. It is fundamentally hostile to the world of big brands and big ad agencies, who have all built elaborate systems to audit the results platforms provide them after a decade of ad fraud and measurement scandals, and who have very strong opinions about what platforms like Meta can and cannot do well.” Good luck Mark.

The AI Slop Presidency (7-min read)
When I saw some of those Trump photos from the POTUS account on Instagram last week, I went back through my feed and checked a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t viewing a spoof account of some sort. But no, it’s all part of the larger game plan….we think: “AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.”

Deleting My Podcast Wiped My Publication (4-min read)
Why you need to be VERY VERY careful when you entrust all your content to a platform, something we talk to our clients about a lot. This is, as Storythings’ Matt Locke says, “a catastrophic failure of Substack as platform. It wasn’t just the content - she lost paid and free subscribers info, and even the 200+ recommendations from other Substacks, which are a key growth engine.”

Isle of Any’s Coinbase Campaign Is Meant To Mess Up your TV (1-min watch)
I am determined not to send you off into your weekend without something fun to watch after some pretty long, if solid, reads today. So here you go - go forth and enjoy!

A secret for our loyal readers who make it all the way down here. It’s been great hearing how some of you like this bit, so here’s a bit of trivia: did you know that on this day in 1969, May 9th, an episode of the show ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood’ broke the colour barrier when Fred Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, a Black police officer on the show, to join him and cool his feet in a small plastic wading pool?

Too many of us at Storythings are quiz/trivia geeks!

See you next week!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

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