[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"cms-topics":3,"$f110nrlro40n86":34},[4,13,20,27],{"slug":5,"name":6,"intro":7,"introText":8,"seoTitle":6,"seoDescription":9,"essayCount":10,"indexable":11,"path":12},"trust-as-infrastructure","Trust as Infrastructure",null,"Signals, systems, networks, time, and resilience - and how they build on each other. The conventional wisdom on trust is wrong. This is the correction. Each article breaks down one assumption about authenticity, credibility, or signals... and rebuilds it from the ground up. Strategy for leaders who need credibility to actually hold.","The conventional wisdom on trust is wrong. This is the correction. Strategy for leaders who need credibility to actually hold.",17,true,"\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure",{"slug":14,"name":15,"intro":7,"introText":16,"seoTitle":15,"seoDescription":17,"essayCount":18,"indexable":11,"path":19},"human-in-the-loop","Human in the Loop","AI won't replace your expertise. It will expose whether you had any. Personal essays from the professional middle: the judgment calls, identity questions, and uncomfortable moments that don't show up in the frameworks. For practitioners navigating the AI transition without a script.","AI won't replace your expertise. It will expose whether you had any. For practitioners navigating the AI transition without a script.",7,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fhuman-in-the-loop",{"slug":21,"name":22,"intro":7,"introText":23,"seoTitle":22,"seoDescription":24,"essayCount":25,"indexable":11,"path":26},"craft","Craft","The gap between what you intend to signal and what your audience actually receives is where trust dies. Practical reads on the visible layer: what your clients, readers, and critics see when they look, and how the thing got made that way. Because the strategy is only as good as what shows up on the other side.","The gap between what you intend to signal and what your audience actually receives is where trust dies. Practical reads on the visible layer, and how the work gets made.",11,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fcraft",{"slug":28,"name":29,"intro":7,"introText":30,"seoTitle":29,"seoDescription":31,"essayCount":32,"indexable":11,"path":33},"creative-technology","Creative Technology","Most of the interesting work happens at the seams between industries. The real-time engines built for games turn out to be what the water sector needed. Generative AI makes more sense as an org chart than as math. Notes from thirty years of pointing new tools at old problems, and watching what happens when someone aims them wrong.","Where new tools meet old problems. Real-time engines for the water sector, generative AI as an org chart, and how to aim technology at the right target.",3,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fcreative-technology",{"essay":35,"related":220},{"slug":36,"title":37,"subtitle":38,"excerpt":39,"publishAt":40,"topic":41,"heroId":42,"path":43,"body":44,"bodyText":176,"seoTitle":177,"seoDescription":39,"canonicalUrl":7,"dateUpdated":178,"citations":179},"lawsuit-licensing-same-negotiation","The lawsuit and the licensing deal are the same negotiation","Answer engines stopped paying for attribution with clicks. Now it gets priced in court and in contracts.","AI summaries cut the clicks that paid publishers. Lawsuits and licensing deals now price attribution, and what you can prove you made is what gets paid for.","2026-10-20T12:00:00.000Z",{"slug":5,"name":6},"68a28f4e-4ad5-4db9-ae0a-0b6d0f031e6f","\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure\u002Flawsuit-licensing-same-negotiation",{"type":45,"children":46},"root",[47,55,60,65,70,77,82,87,92,97,103,108,113,118,124,129,145,150,155,161,166,171],{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":50,"children":51},"element","p",{},[52],{"type":53,"value":54},"text","In July 2024, News Corp sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter. Nobody answered, according to News Corp. In October it sued on behalf of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, alleging that the answer engine copied and summarized \"large quantities\" of its articles, analyses and opinions without permission.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":56,"children":57},{},[58],{"type":53,"value":59},"The complaint goes further than scraping. News Corp says Perplexity sometimes reproduced its work verbatim, and sometimes \"falsely attributed facts or even invented news stories under News Corp's name.\" It asked the court to make Perplexity stop and to destroy any databases holding its work.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":61,"children":62},{},[63],{"type":53,"value":64},"In the same breath, CEO Robert Thomson praised OpenAI for taking the other road and signing deals with News Corp and other publishers to use their content legally. The coverage also noted that Perplexity had already started paying some publishers, Time and Fortune among them.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":66,"children":67},{},[68],{"type":53,"value":69},"So one AI company was in court, another was at the table, and the defendant was already writing checks to other publishers. Those are News Corp's claims, as Digital Watch reported them. But the pattern is plain: AI companies either pay publishers or end up in court.",{"type":48,"tag":71,"props":72,"children":74},"h2",{"id":73},"the-link-used-to-pay-the-bill",[75],{"type":53,"value":76},"The link used to pay the bill",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":78,"children":79},{},[80],{"type":53,"value":81},"For about twenty years the deal between publishers and search engines was never written down. Search sent readers. Readers saw ads and hit paywalls. The link was the unit of credit, and credit turned into money on the publisher's own page.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":83,"children":84},{},[85],{"type":53,"value":86},"Answer engines broke that deal by answering the question. Perplexity, in the coverage's phrasing, pitched itself as a way to help users \"skip the links.\" Pew measured what that does at Google. Across 68,879 searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, people who got an AI summary clicked a regular result in 8% of visits. People who didn't get one clicked in 15%. Links inside the summary got clicked in 1% of visits.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":88,"children":89},{},[90],{"type":53,"value":91},"That's one search engine, one month, one panel, but it's enough to see the scale of the problem. The reader still gets the publisher's work, compressed into a paragraph (and sometimes paraphrased incorrectly). The publisher gets about half the visits it used to.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":93,"children":94},{},[95],{"type":53,"value":96},"When a publisher sues, then, it's arguing about price. The work is still being used. What went missing is the mechanism that paid for the use. A lawsuit puts a number on that in public, and a licensing deal puts a number on it in private. Thomson suing one AI company while praising another for paying is one position, held consistently.",{"type":48,"tag":71,"props":98,"children":100},{"id":99},"your-work-has-two-prices-now",[101],{"type":53,"value":102},"Your work has two prices now",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":104,"children":105},{},[106],{"type":53,"value":107},"Anyone who makes trusted content now owns work with two values. One is what it's worth to people reading it. The other is what it's worth to machines that train on it, retrieve it and cite it. The first is shrinking for a lot of publishers, for the reasons Pew measured. The second is being priced right now, in court filings and contract terms.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":109,"children":110},{},[111],{"type":53,"value":112},"The second market rewards different things. The citation is becoming the unit of credit, and the early data on who gets cited is lopsided. Profound's analysis of 680 million citations found Wikipedia supplied nearly half of ChatGPT's top-ten sources and Reddit nearly half of Perplexity's. A roundup of vendor studies reports, citing enterprise agentic marketing platform Yext, that sites hosting original research or first-party content draw 4.31 times more citations per URL than listings do. Those are marketing vendors measuring their own market, so I'd trust the direction more than the multiplier. Machines cite what they can't find anywhere else.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":114,"children":115},{},[116],{"type":53,"value":117},"That's the asset News Corp is defending. A Wall Street Journal story is worth something to a machine because the Journal reported it, ran it first, and can be held to account for it.",{"type":48,"tag":71,"props":119,"children":121},{"id":120},"what-you-license-is-what-you-can-prove",[122],{"type":53,"value":123},"What you license is what you can prove",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":125,"children":126},{},[127],{"type":53,"value":128},"The invented-stories allegation changes what the case is about. Copying a story takes something from a publisher. Making one up and putting the publisher's name on it spends that publisher's credibility on work it never did.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":130,"children":131},{},[132,134,143],{"type":53,"value":133},"The BBC found the same failure when it tested four AI assistants on 100 news questions in December 2024. Of the quotes the assistants attributed to BBC articles, 13% were altered or didn't appear in the article cited, and 19% of answers citing BBC content introduced factual errors. I wrote about where those errors land in ",{"type":48,"tag":135,"props":136,"children":140},"a",{"href":137,"rel":138},"https:\u002F\u002Fandrewmarconi.com\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure\u002Fyour-name-is-still-on-it",[139],"nofollow",[141],{"type":53,"value":142},"45% of the time, the AI gets the news wrong",{"type":53,"value":144},". They land on the name.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":146,"children":147},{},[148],{"type":53,"value":149},"This is where the economics and the trust argument meet. A publisher can only license what it can prove it made. It can only sue over work it can show was its own, published at a time it can document, in a form it can match against what the machine produced. And it can only fight a fabrication if it can show the story never ran.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":151,"children":152},{},[153],{"type":53,"value":154},"Provenance used to be a defensive tool, the thing you reached for when someone faked your photo. In this market it's inventory. A dated, signed, archived record of what you published is what a licensing deal gets written against, and it's the evidence a lawsuit gets built on.",{"type":48,"tag":71,"props":156,"children":158},{"id":157},"if-youre-not-news-corp",[159],{"type":53,"value":160},"If you're not News Corp",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":162,"children":163},{},[164],{"type":53,"value":165},"Most people producing trusted content will never sue an AI company or get a licensing call from one. The repricing reaches them anyway. If your value is attribution, and attribution is now handed out by machines that may or may not show your name, the work that holds up is the work you can prove is yours: original data, first reporting, a dated archive, a public record of what you said and when.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":167,"children":168},{},[169],{"type":53,"value":170},"The publishers in court and the publishers on the payroll are making the same bet. Machines want the work they can't get anywhere else, and they'll pay for it only when its owner can prove it.",{"type":48,"tag":49,"props":172,"children":173},{},[174],{"type":53,"value":175},"Trust you can't prove you own is trust nobody has to pay for.","In July 2024, News Corp sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter. Nobody answered, according to News Corp. In October it sued on behalf of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, alleging that the answer engine copied and summarized \"large quantities\" of its articles, analyses and opinions without permission. The complaint goes further than scraping. News Corp says Perplexity sometimes reproduced its work verbatim, and sometimes \"falsely attributed facts or even invented news stories under News Corp's name.\" It asked the court to make Perplexity stop and to destroy any databases holding its work. In the same breath, CEO Robert Thomson praised OpenAI for taking the other road and signing deals with News Corp and other publishers to use their content legally. The coverage also noted that Perplexity had already started paying some publishers, Time and Fortune among them. So one AI company was in court, another was at the table, and the defendant was already writing checks to other publishers. Those are News Corp's claims, as Digital Watch reported them. But the pattern is plain: AI companies either pay publishers or end up in court. The link used to pay the bill For about twenty years the deal between publishers and search engines was never written down. Search sent readers. Readers saw ads and hit paywalls. The link was the unit of credit, and credit turned into money on the publisher's own page. Answer engines broke that deal by answering the question. Perplexity, in the coverage's phrasing, pitched itself as a way to help users \"skip the links.\" Pew measured what that does at Google. Across 68,879 searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, people who got an AI summary clicked a regular result in 8% of visits. People who didn't get one clicked in 15%. Links inside the summary got clicked in 1% of visits. That's one search engine, one month, one panel, but it's enough to see the scale of the problem. The reader still gets the publisher's work, compressed into a paragraph (and sometimes paraphrased incorrectly). The publisher gets about half the visits it used to. When a publisher sues, then, it's arguing about price. The work is still being used. What went missing is the mechanism that paid for the use. A lawsuit puts a number on that in public, and a licensing deal puts a number on it in private. Thomson suing one AI company while praising another for paying is one position, held consistently. Your work has two prices now Anyone who makes trusted content now owns work with two values. One is what it's worth to people reading it. The other is what it's worth to machines that train on it, retrieve it and cite it. The first is shrinking for a lot of publishers, for the reasons Pew measured. The second is being priced right now, in court filings and contract terms. The second market rewards different things. The citation is becoming the unit of credit, and the early data on who gets cited is lopsided. Profound's analysis of 680 million citations found Wikipedia supplied nearly half of ChatGPT's top-ten sources and Reddit nearly half of Perplexity's. A roundup of vendor studies reports, citing enterprise agentic marketing platform Yext, that sites hosting original research or first-party content draw 4.31 times more citations per URL than listings do. Those are marketing vendors measuring their own market, so I'd trust the direction more than the multiplier. Machines cite what they can't find anywhere else. That's the asset News Corp is defending. A Wall Street Journal story is worth something to a machine because the Journal reported it, ran it first, and can be held to account for it. What you license is what you can prove The invented-stories allegation changes what the case is about. Copying a story takes something from a publisher. Making one up and putting the publisher's name on it spends that publisher's credibility on work it never did. The BBC found the same failure when it tested four AI assistants on 100 news questions in December 2024. Of the quotes the assistants attributed to BBC articles, 13% were altered or didn't appear in the article cited, and 19% of answers citing BBC content introduced factual errors. I wrote about where those errors land in 45% of the time, the AI gets the news wrong. They land on the name. This is where the economics and the trust argument meet. A publisher can only license what it can prove it made. It can only sue over work it can show was its own, published at a time it can document, in a form it can match against what the machine produced. And it can only fight a fabrication if it can show the story never ran. Provenance used to be a defensive tool, the thing you reached for when someone faked your photo. In this market it's inventory. A dated, signed, archived record of what you published is what a licensing deal gets written against, and it's the evidence a lawsuit gets built on. If you're not News Corp Most people producing trusted content will never sue an AI company or get a licensing call from one. The repricing reaches them anyway. If your value is attribution, and attribution is now handed out by machines that may or may not show your name, the work that holds up is the work you can prove is yours: original data, first reporting, a dated archive, a public record of what you said and when. The publishers in court and the publishers on the payroll are making the same bet. Machines want the work they can't get anywhere else, and they'll pay for it only when its owner can prove it. Trust you can't prove you own is trust nobody has to pay for.","Lawsuit or licensing deal, AI is repricing attribution","2026-10-09T02:32:32.357Z",[180,189,197,205,212],{"role":181,"relevance":182,"citation":183},"anchor","News Corp sued Perplexity, alleging it copied its journalism and invented stories under its name, while praising OpenAI for licensing instead.",{"rId":184,"title":185,"byline":186,"year":187,"url":188},"R1372","News Corp Sues Perplexity AI Over Copyright Infringement","Digital Watch Observatory",2024,"https:\u002F\u002Fdig.watch\u002Fupdates\u002Fnews-corp-sues-ai-firm-perplexity-over-copyright-violations",{"role":181,"relevance":190,"citation":191},"Google searchers shown an AI summary clicked a regular result in 8% of visits versus 15% without one, the click loss behind the broken deal.",{"rId":192,"title":193,"byline":194,"year":195,"url":196},"R1309","Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results","Pew Research Center",2025,"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.pewresearch.org\u002Fshort-reads\u002F2025\u002F07\u002F22\u002Fgoogle-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results\u002F",{"role":198,"relevance":199,"citation":200},"context","In the BBC's test of four AI assistants, 13% of quotes attributed to BBC articles were altered or missing from the article cited.",{"rId":201,"title":202,"byline":203,"year":195,"url":204},"R1443","Representation of BBC News content in AI Assistants","Elliott, O., BBC Responsible AI Team","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bbc.co.uk\u002Faboutthebbc\u002Fdocuments\u002Fbbc-research-into-ai-assistants.pdf",{"role":198,"relevance":206,"citation":207},"Across 680 million AI citations, Wikipedia supplied nearly half of ChatGPT's top-ten sources and Reddit nearly half of Perplexity's.",{"rId":208,"title":209,"byline":210,"year":195,"url":211},"R1308","AI Platform Citation Patterns: How ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity Source Information","Lafferty, N.","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.tryprofound.com\u002Fblog\u002Fai-platform-citation-patterns",{"role":198,"relevance":213,"citation":214},"A vendor roundup citing Yext reports that sites hosting original research or first-party content draw 4.31 times more AI citations per URL than listings.",{"rId":215,"title":216,"byline":217,"year":218,"url":219},"R1310","Why Original Research Gets More AI Citations (And How to Optimize for AI Search)","ZipTie.dev",2026,"https:\u002F\u002Fziptie.dev\u002Fblog\u002Fhow-original-research-wins-ai-citations\u002F",[221,230,239],{"slug":222,"title":223,"subtitle":224,"excerpt":225,"publishAt":226,"topic":227,"heroId":228,"path":229},"bias-meter-defended-klan","The Bias Meter Defended the Klan.","A newspaper automated the one thing it had left to sell, then found out what the machine said afterward.","The LA Times shipped an AI writing counterpoints faster than its editors could read. Oversight that can't keep pace with output is a backlog with a nicer name.","2026-09-29T12:00:00.000Z",{"slug":5,"name":6},"bd2d5eab-ba13-4e43-9121-c021e8cc72ab","\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure\u002Fbias-meter-defended-klan",{"slug":231,"title":232,"subtitle":233,"excerpt":234,"publishAt":235,"topic":236,"heroId":237,"path":238},"news-trust-record-low","Trust in the news hit a record low. The least-trusted source is the one growing.","The fastest-growing news channel is the one people trust least, and your credibility has to survive the trip.","Trust in news fell to 37% while the least-trusted channel grew fastest. What survives an AI summary is receipts a machine can point at and people who vouch.","2026-09-22T12:00:00.000Z",{"slug":5,"name":6},"2b4ce95f-b276-4408-8313-750f44e4539f","\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure\u002Fnews-trust-record-low",{"slug":240,"title":241,"subtitle":242,"excerpt":243,"publishAt":244,"topic":245,"heroId":246,"path":247},"your-name-is-still-on-it","45% of the time, the AI gets the news wrong. Your name's still on it.","An assistant rewrote a grieving family's words, credited the BBC, and nobody at the BBC knew.","AI assistants misattribute what they summarize, and the error lands on the outlet they cite. What a newsroom still controls when provenance won't hold.","2026-09-15T12:00:00.000Z",{"slug":5,"name":6},"37965b87-49a5-4bb4-b891-e478e0655b79","\u002Fwriting\u002Ftrust-as-infrastructure\u002Fyour-name-is-still-on-it"]