A bit of reportage this week. Content Aware was at the first Glide Live event yesterday in London, cunningly titled Glide Live: London, where a wildly eclectic mix of news, advocacy, science, sports and numerous other forms of media people bundled into a closed room to hatch, what seemed to me, a pretty good plan to conker the doom and gloom of those who say publishing is on the way out.
Billed as an anti-conference, it turned on its head the usual woe-is-me predictions which come of out of many events, that creating any sort of media business or channel these days is a waste of time because AI is going to steal it all, or Google is going to make its own version, or “but… social media!”.
All those things are somewhat true - if you let them. But in a room of A-list talent - and me - everyone there has known for years that playing the publishing game according to the rules of the most avaricious of the tech firms is a path to nowhere.
Wide horizons
The range of attendees I met was wide, from the BMJ, Which?, the Daily Mail, PokerOrg, CNN, Channel 4, Formula 1, The FA, Arsenal, Watford FC, Better Collective, The Spectator, DJB Strategies, Atlas Advisory, DC Thompson, SportsBeat, and many more, with cricket, rugby, football, F1 and the Olympics rounding out the very wide retinue of viewpoints.
It was a closed-door event so I won’t de-Schrödinger the cat about what was said, but you had people as apparently unconnected as one of the world’s leading medical and science publishers, and those who head up how the England football team talks to the world (off the pitch, that is) agreeing that when you know who your audience is, and talk to them relevantly about things they want to know more about, you are in a good spot.
Being a trusted source and knowing your audience is even more critical than it has ever been. It’s not going away, whatever the rise of AI implies, and as much as Google and Meta know your audience they are falling further off a cliff for the other part, trust.
The mood was buoyed by a number of other things discussed, including the publisher SPUR initiative we have mentioned before, effective and aggressive strategies to block bots, initiatives to take legal action against misappropriated content, and the growing mass of legal and regulatory action pointed at the AI robber barons and search monopolies.
Keep your eyes peeled for an authorised summary of the day next week, which will include some revealing stats prepared for the event by SEO doyen Barry Adams, and some questions for you, dear reader, on how to make Content Aware more useful each week. Perhaps we should do our own Content Aware gathering to see what rights we can wrong together.
Have a good week and see you next.
Human review over everything
Two new studies published in Digital Journalism, how AI policies affect credibility and what audiences expect from AI labels, dig into what audiences actually want from publishers when it comes to AI. It's not that complicated, human review of all AI content is the single biggest factor driving credibility and news selection. While having AI labels is good, some are saying that it can also backfire and cue them to fact-check elsewhere or see the outlet as taking shortcuts. The distinction between "generated by AI" and "assisted by AI" is extremely important, and if there are labels they should be precise without being technical, ideally standardised in the industry and placed at the top. Separately, another study has shown that legacy media and professional experts are still seen as more trustworthy on TikTok than random creators, even on a platform where the overall credibility bar is low. Nieman Lab has more info.
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Producing more, connecting less
A study of 400+ newsroom leaders across 86 countries found that audience engagement is now journalism's top strategic priority, but despite that over 30% of journalists' workweek still goes to content production rather than talking to audiences or finding stories. Only around 10% of newsrooms have roles bridging strategy, engagement, and editorial. The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't technical, but organisational resistance. The advice from the research is simple: share the audience data, discuss it, and stop measuring success in page views, because how long people stay, share, and comment matters much more.
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Publishers stop asking, start billing
31 UK websites have added "Search-Only Contracts" to their terms, adding a price of £500 per article for unauthorised AI scraping. The mechanism is pretty simple: bots that visit the site agree to the terms when they access the site, publishers then prove that their content appeared in a chatbot, issue an invoice, and if they get no money, enforce it through county court. If the debt still doesn't get paid, then the bailiffs can visit the company's UK offices. These contracts have been backed by AOP and PPA, and complement the CMA's recent ruling that Google can't go after the publishers who refuse to give content away for free.
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Can your CMS actually work with an agent?
Every CMS vendor out there is claiming agent-readiness, but what does that term actually mean? A chatbot bolted on or a few AI features doesn't really cut it, as the real test is a bit more complex: can a trusted agent discover your content model, complete governed read and write workflows, respect permissions and approvals, respond to content changes reliably, and work alongside your other systems? If a vendor can't demonstrate these claims, then what they have is a marketing claim, not agent-readiness. Here is how we think about it at Glide.
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The UK pulls the trigger
The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed a full ban on under-16s accessing social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook, describing the measures as "Australia plus". Gaming apps and messaging services aren't safe from restrictions either, as they will have to deal with stranger-chat features and disappearing messages. Even older teenagers will be restricted when it comes to late-night scrolling. Nine out of ten parents backed the ban, but there are critics as well - including the Molly Rose Foundation - which warned that it's unenforceable and gives no incentive for platforms to actually make their products safer.
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Not great, not terrible
Google has recently updated its AI Search Optimisation guide to clarify that llms.txt files, markdown, and other AI-related files don't help, but also don't hurt your search rankings. Google Discover doesn't use them, but it may discover, crawl, and index them like any other file on your site, no special treatment included. Publishers are free to maintain them for other services that might use them, but there shouldn't be any SEO benefit expectations.
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Poisoned comments, poisoned answers
According to Cornell researchers, a snippet of only 13 words inserted into a Reddit comment can reliably manipulate what AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI search tell users. Deep research agents will cite user-generated content from Wikipedia, Reddit, and Quora in roughly half of all queries, and those systems treat a random subreddit comment with as much credibility as a government website. The trick is very simple: phrase your promotional text to mirror popular AI queries, plant it into a relevant subreddit, and wait. Both a fake restaurant recommendation as well as a made-up dating app have made it into LLM outputs from one poisoned comment. To make things worse, according to the researchers moderating against this isn't feasible long term, as these attack texts are too short and too human-looking to reliably detect.
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From faceless to face-for-hire
As YouTube cracks down on AI slop on the platform, their algorithm now rewards videos with human faces, giving less spotlight to faceless creators and channels. Those who previously banked six figures monthly without ever appearing on camera are now getting demonetised or seeing their reach dwindle. However, people are already finding workarounds on Upwork and Fiverr, hiring hosts to front videos they script and produce behind the scenes. The faceless space isn't dead, but the era of fully anonymous AI-generated money printing on YouTube appears to be sunsetting.
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Be careful what you lobby for
Three days after it saw daylight, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 has been shut down worldwide after the order from the US Commerce Department. Anthropic complied, as is now processing refunds for customers who paid for a product that has vanished. The reason? National security, as reportedly Amazon demonstrated to officials a method for defeating the model's safety controls. It is a bit ironic, as Anthropic has been calling for government oversight of powerful AI for years, and the government did exactly that to its latest product.
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The tracks nobody asked for
After cases where AI generated music racked up hundreds of thousands of listens on social media and even made it into local commercial radio playlists, musicians are revolting against it. While there isn't any legal obligation for streaming platforms to label AI tracks, some of them are taking different voluntary approaches. BBC knows more.
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Safety theatre, starring AI
Several frontier AI models can now detect when they’re undergoing safety evaluations and adjust their behaviour, according to research. Moonshot’s Kimi K2.6 recognised the test and changed its responses 60% of the time, and it doesn’t only happen with Chinese LLMs, Claude 4.5 Opus scored nearly 80% on the same metric. The implication is uncomfortable for any regulator relying on pre-deployment testing: if a model passes because it spotted the exam, the results don’t reflect how it’ll behave in the wild. The question is whether safety testing can evolve fast enough to stay ahead.
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