The Cult of the Founder Is Distorting AI Coverage
Personality is easier to write about than systems, and the incentives point the same way.
There is a version of artificial intelligence journalism in which the field consists of about eight people. They appear on magazine covers, testify before legislatures, publish manifestos, and are asked to comment on each other’s decisions. The companies they run employ tens of thousands of people doing work that never appears in the coverage.
Readers respond to people, not architectures
It is partly structural. Readers respond to people, not architectures. An interview with a chief executive is easier to commission and easier to write than an investigation into an evaluation methodology. Both are journalism; one reliably produces traffic.
It is partly access. A reporter who wants to understand how a model was trained needs sources inside a company, and sources have preferences about how they are portrayed. Access is a currency, and it is spent on coverage that maintains it.
- Personality stories are cheaper to produce than technical reporting.
- Executive access depends on favourable coverage, creating a soft constraint.
- The industry’s own PR capacity is concentrated on a handful of figures.
Data sourcing, hospital deployments, automated decisions
The important stories in the last few years were mostly about systems: how data was sourced, how evaluations were designed, what happened when a model was deployed in a hospital, who was harmed by an automated decision. None of them required a founder interview, and most of them received a fraction of the attention.
Executive interviews are a source about intentions, not technology
The remedy is not to stop covering executives. It is to be honest about what executive coverage is good for, which is mostly the direction of a company rather than the state of a technology. Understanding the technology requires talking to people who do not have press officers, and that is more expensive journalism that someone has to decide to fund.
When the relationship becomes the constraint
Access journalism is not a synonym for bad journalism. Understanding a company requires talking to people inside it, and those people have preferences about the resulting coverage. The distortion appears when the relationship itself becomes the constraint on what can be reported.
The observable symptom is a coverage pattern in which a company’s strategy is analysed in detail while its operations are not examined at all. That asymmetry is usually a sign that the sources being cultivated are senior.
Filings, court records and the technical literature
The most practical corrective is to read coverage for what it is. An interview with a chief executive is a primary source about that person’s intentions and a weak source about anything else, including the state of their own technology.
The secondary sources that matter are filings, court records, regulatory submissions and the technical literature. None of them respond to flattery, and all of them are more difficult to write about, which is why they receive less attention.
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