[some Devil Wears Prada 2 movie spoilers]
Today, on the JEN_AI program..
How to create your own automated news agent
..why that might be a terrible idea
How the sequel to an iconic 20-year-old movie is today’s news foretold on the silver screen
Plus: 3 topical tunes
This is JEN_AI Challenge #16: personalised, automated news
If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Jenni Munroe, a recently-ex-Google/DeepMind generative artificial intelligence (‘GenAI’) experimentalist who’s been hooked on human+AI creativity since 2010. I’m challenging myself (and you, if you want to) to stress-test and mash-up both new & retro tech, culture and media, and to grapple with what it means to be human in the age of AI.
to clarify a bad pun: “Your local newsagent” is a little shop near your home in Britain selling essentials including newspapers in real, printed form. Imagine.
An AI “agent” is a computer program that can carry out actions to achieve a goal. Think: ‘here’s my computer and the internet, go make me $100’ vs. asking a chatbot to answer a question. The more it relies on autonomously sensing, planning and actually doing things, the more “agentic” the behaviour.
A “journalist”, or so a chatbot tells me, has standards; “a commitment to truth”, “independence”, “holding those in power accountable”, and “contextualising” what happens in the world. ..And in the UK is a registered member of a ‘trusted profession’ respectable enough to countersign my kid’s passport application (thanks Dan!).
Last week I got an email from an AI-positive journalist, Casey Newton (who co-hosts the excellent New York Times’ tech culture podcast) to let his subscribers know he was having to pivot his personal media platform away from news aggregation and analysis towards investigative reporting - due to AI encroachment.
Also: three nights ago I watched an unexpectedly prescient documentary about the fight to save journalism, art, beauty and humanity from Tech Bro Billionaires. It was called: “The Devil Wears Prada 2”. You think I’m joking.
Interesting timing, then, for me to plow on ahead with my planned JEN_AI experiment to show how people can dip a toe into setting up AI agents - by creating their own scheduled newsletters. Which I’m writing up in my own presumably-AI-threatened newsletter about AI.
Hmm. Let’s see how this one goes down.
An actual journalist might have thoroughly reported on a balanced, unbiased selection of AI agents. However. We are keeping this simple:
At time of writing Google Gemini has arguably the easiest, most underrated way to set up an agent to send automated briefings sent directly to you each week/day/whatever as a native notification on your phone.
Steps to set up a scheduled news report on the Google Gemini app:
If you don’t already have the Gemini app on your phone, download it & log in.
Type in the prompt “Schedule a [daily/weekly] briefing for me at [time, day etc.] on [topic(s)]. Generate one now.”
That’s it. Now for the experiments. Some things I tried, from most to least successful:
A newsletter that decodes clickbait titles from the week’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast episodes, & distills claims into fact-checked life advice so I can decide which to listen to.
A daily summary of global news headlines and market moves. Sources were linked and showed we’re certainly pulling from lesser-known news outlets here. Clicking the “speaker” icon to play it out loud over breakfast was surprisingly acceptable. (Monotone newsreader voice is surely still the most at-risk category for AI voice replacement, seeing as it forces humans to speak like news-robots.)
A daily AI & frontier tech briefing. I get a lot of AI newsletters (many written with the help of AI) and the selection of stories covered by my agent was slightly - I won’t say “random” - but certainly needs some fine-tuning. I did like being able to ask follow-up questions directly in the newsletter window.
A morning briefing from my to-do list and calendar. The first attempt got me a hallucinated BBQ. The second try got my actual to-do list from Google tasks & checked my emails, but this works best if you A) have Personalisation enabled in settings and B) already use the Google ecosystem (Gmail/calendar/tasks etc.)
A Thursday “local concierge” roundup of family-friendly events near me & the weather forecast for the upcoming weekend. This probably looks more exciting if you don’t live in a rural village.
I iterated on all of these a few times (asking Gemini to update the instructions) to get something slightly more verified and better fitting my content and format preferences.
For the nerds: you’ll know that in computing, “not local” means “not on your device”. In later JEN_AI episodes we’ll cover using sophisticated agents on your computer with more personal context and with greater capabilities to take actions to achieve a goal (control your browser, create local files etc.)
Anyway, yes. AI can encroach on news aggregation and analysis. And these were only a few quick examples from one AI tool. (Perhaps I should try pivoting to this AI-proof “investigative reporting” thing?)
But. A friend of mine and previous JEN_AI guest Caroline Crampton runs an email newsletter called Thursday Thirteen, which is a roundup of interesting links. But I don’t read it just because the links are interesting - I read it because she thinks the links are interesting. In a single bullet point for each link Caz manages to communicate her reaction to the linked media, her personality and her editorial context in choosing it. To read it is to connect with a real human I care about. Maybe there will be different lanes for AI news, but I can’t see that demand for human meaning, taste and connection going away. But we do need to work out how people get paid.
Talking of real humans in media [but BEWARE movie spoilers, skip this section], the devil in the Devil Wears Prada 2 is not Meryl Streep’s Vogue fashion magazine boss Anna Wintour but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (with wafts of Elon Musk), who owns The Washington Post in real life and laid off roughly 1/3 of its workforce in Feb 2026. Also portrayed: his philanthropic reclusive ex-wife Mackenzie Scott, new spouse Lauren Sanchez Bezos (the former journalist’s wedding was begrudgingly covered in - yes - Vogue magazine), and a possibly generic Silicon Valley Patagonia-vest-wearing venture capital tech bro. The release of the movie this week was timed for fashion’s annual highlight for added PR: the Met Gala, of which event Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez were later announced as honorary chairs, a step which sparked real-life protests and boycotts peaking this week. The Met Gala is quite literally a costume party (it’s based on the Met’s “Costume Art” exhibition this year) of wealth promenading as art (many of the dresses worn to this $100K ticket event are designed to look like famous paintings and sculptures). With both the movie’s main characters and actors in attendance. Life imitating art imitating life and art. With typically bold art-fashion looks.
Some fans made their own AI-assisted fashion creations which I won’t reproduce to respect the real celebrities unwillingly starring in them, but some are so good you could even call them.. art. Aside: today in this podcast video recording I’m in costume as Anne Hathaway’s perpetually-in-need-of-a-fashion-makeover-and-a-better-job journalist character Andy Sachs, just to join in all the costume fun.
Now look. If watching the first Devil Wears Prada movie wasn’t a core memory for you, if you’ve never called Silicon Valley or New York home, if you’ve never experienced mass layoffs determined by a Big Tech CEO, never simultaneously exhaustedly despaired at technology’s relentless destruction of humanity and its culture while getting paid to use tech to automate labour nor used AI in your leisure time to re-imagine art or journalism.. And if you’ve not once been pursued by media outlets for an exposé on the alleged behaviour of the global powerhouse executive ex-boss you assisted, this film may seem less personal for you than it did for me. By all means, skip it.
One thing that was notably (thankfully) absent from DWP2’s film fantasy was sovereign government politics. Tech CEOs themselves must meet the decrees of governments (and I gather that governments act on their citizens’ behalf?). Australia for instance has banned social media for kids and is threatening a journalism tax for tech companies who do not cut deals with publishers. With the developing cybersecurity issues triggered by AI, who knows: U.S. governmental.. governance (?) for AI might even be on the horizon.
This Devil Wears Prada sequel thankfully ditches the actual second book’s plot about the two ex-assistants starting a high-end bridal magazine (!) and serves up a fantasy where there is a way forward that combines human taste, labour and artistic direction, journalistic integrity, technology and tech investment. A world where people eventually get things they have earned and don’t have to overlook their values and dreams in order to make a living. Call me as irritatingly naive as Andy Sachs, but maybe we could try it?
Personally, I think the humans of the world are desperate to get off their phones and are ready for a nostalgic return to both off-screen/print media and in-person events & communal spectacles like festivals, concerts and fashion shows. Even if they evolve. More on this next episode.
Last thing. Who fills the role of devilous villain, triumphant saviour or victim/assistant switches depending on your perspective. The movie’s parting thoughts will not be news to you: we are human, imperfect. We have.. agency. And we don’t need to invisibly wait, shelter or wilt in someone else’s shadow. “You are iconic.”
I setup an agent to give me the downlow on the top music downloads (or rather, tell me the ‘most streamed music tracks in the UK each week & why they’re trending’). At no.1 (after some ‘clarifications’):
“Rein Me In” by Sam Fender & Olivia Dean (apparently it’s the Song of The Year at The Brits, in the Season 4 Finale of The Bear, and a TikTok meme)
But.. the human in me had already chosen these also-trending tracks:
On the tragicomic pursuit of agents: “Price of It All” by Jorja Smith. A James-Bondesque ballad from recent show “Bait” about a South-Asian man auditioning to be the next 007.
On prevailing: “Shape of a Woman” by Lady Gaga. This was an absolute moment in the Devil Wears Prada 2 movie.
Playlist: The JEN_AI Mixtape
You can listen in podcast form on Apple podcasts or Spotify, watch the videos on YouTube or autoplaying on Substack (apologies), check out the playlist, or read this newsletter, which is also available in the Substack app or via email straight to your inbox if you’ve subscribed.
If you like it, you can support me by clicking “like”, subscribe (it’s free!) to get sent new episodes via your preferred channels or click below to “share” it with a friend or the internet. Comments & feedback welcomed!
Thanks for being part of the experiment.
Jenni aka JEN_AI x
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.