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For the past two years, I’ve written predictions for how AI will continue to change the media industry and the business of news in the coming year. Prognosticating is a risky business even at the most tranquil of times, and media’s AI era is anything but: bots are multiplying, newsrooms are shrinking, and new business models always seem to be still developing. Last year, four of the five predictions I made came true, those being the spread of audio experiences like NotebookLM’s audio overviews, a greater emphasis on content licensing, more “legit” AI-generated content, and publishers doing more with their own summarization and chatbots. I should have probably known my one strike was going to be agentsthat was such a buzzword last year that I couldn’t avoid including it, but it turns out there were significant barriers keeping agents outside the mainstream (data privacy and complexity being the main ones). This time, the task is even more challenging. Many trends, like AI adoption in newsrooms, are further along, which you would think makes their effects easier to predict. But the reality is that the most impactful things happen when those trends slam into realities, such as Cloudflare taking a hard stance against AI ingesting publisher content without compensation or consequence. Who saw that coming? {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more, visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} With all that in mind, here are my predictions for how AI’s presence in media will evolve in the next year: 1. The copyright issue gets worse before it gets better Despite an ever-growing set of lawsuits, the copyright issue is still largely unresolved. Publishers want compensation for how their content is ingested and used by AI companies, which continue to claim fair use. Sure, there are more licensing deals between the two sides, but the fundamental tension remains. What’s changed is that more publishers have woken up to what they see as the predations of the AI industry, and they’ve gotten more aggressive at blocking AI crawlers. That prevents AI engines from bringing users the best, most up-to-date data, which makes them less competitive. This, however, doesn’t apply to Google, because it uses the same crawler for search and AI, and no publisher in their right mind would ever block Google Search. That gives Google a competitive advantage at a time where OpenAI just went into “code red” for fear of falling behind. Similarly, Perplexity is now the target for legal action from both News Corp. and The New York Times for how it summarizes their content. For any AI company in a race with Google, it’s hard to see how they can balance respecting copyright with staying competitive. If even the tremendously successful OpenAI sees the threat as existential, it’s hard to see how any of them wouldn’t see the copyright issue as secondary. My expectation: Not only will AI companies avoid making moves that broadly support content providers (such as enabling them to block user agents)they may even become more brazen about ignoring safeguards like the Robots Exclusion Protocol. 2. AI focus in newsrooms shifts to product and revenue When The New York Times opened the doors for AI use by its staff, it was an indicator that newsrooms were becoming more comfortable with using AI to improve efficiency with things like transcription and social media management. Similarly, the launch of more sophisticated AI-infused products like Times AI Agentwhich turns the publication’s vast archive into a grounded, AI-ready corpussignals a shift toward AI products that could potentially improve the bottom line. Whether that opens up real revenue is unclear, and the road is certainly longer and bumpier than deploying an AI headline writer (Politico recently got into hot water with its newsroom union over an AI tool for its lucrative Politico Pro division), but the potential rewards are great enough that we’re sure to see more publishers go this route. 3. PR’s lean renaissance The era of “go direct” PR led many to postulate that the whole industry might face a steep decline, if not become entirely obsolete. However, AI has revived PR for a new era: Since AI engines look for credibility across domains and platforms, the ability to get a story cited widely, even on lesser-known sites, is newly valuable. However, AI is also forcing the industry to rethink the basicseven more than the media. Since much of PR work involves content, and it doesn’t have the same audience relationship that has kept almost all journalism authentically human, there’s intense pressure on the client side to leverage AI in content generation to cut costs. That all translates into a strengthened PR industry, but one that’s by necessity smarter and leaner than before. 4. Authenticity reasserts itself When generative AI first arrived, there was existential dread that big chunks of journalism would end up being authored by AI. While AI has secured a place in many newsrooms, that prediction largely hasn’t come to pass. That’s not because AI isn’t capable of researching, analyzing, and writing stories, but because AI authorship alters the audience relationship. In other words, human authenticity is back in style. AI can still be an accelerant here, helping more publications adopt video formats like the Times “explain the news” vertical shorts. With AI reducing the cost of production, the choice of expanding to a new platform will have more to do with audience opportunity, as it should be. 5. Continued prioritization of owned audience Just because we’re likely not going to Google Zero, doesn’t mean media properties can relax. A world of “Google Smaller” still means publishers will need to keep divesting from strategies dependent on SEO traffic, and direct their energies toward building and nurturing direct, habitual audience relationships through proprietary apps and formats with traditionally higher engagement, like newsletters and live events. The bad news: the more who do, the harder it will be to stand out. It may still be early days for AI, but we’re well past the point of no return. More and more people are using it for information discovery (34%, up from 18% a year ago, per the Reuters Institute) and journalists continue to adopt AI as part of their workflows (more than half now use it at least once a week). The industry is clearly adapting to the new AI reality, and whether or not we get clearer answers to the big questions around copyright and business models, 2026 might be the year the media’s AI survival manual gets written. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more, visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
Its rare that your esoteric, impossible-to-pronounce, decade-long research project becomes a technology so crucial to national security that the President of the United States calls it out from the White House. But thats exactly what happened to Dr. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg AI. Wengrowski spent nearly a decade of his life advancing steganography, a deeply-technical method for tracking images as they travel through the machinery of the modern Internet, as the focus of his PHD at Rutgers University. After earning his degree, Wengrowki and a team of co-founders rolled his tech into a small startup. For several years, the company grew, but mostly toiled away in relative obscurity. Then, AI image generators exploded into the publics consciousness. And for Wengrowki and Stegs team, everything blew up. Durable Marks I met Wengrowski during the pandemic, when we both volunteered to help a media industry trade group rapidly pivot its yearly in-person conference to a Zoom format. For years, I only knew Wengrowski as a cheerful, highly-intelligent floating head in my video chat window. I even interviewed him for my YouTube channel from the COVID-safe confines of our respective home offices. When I finally met him in person in San Francisco in 2023, I discovered that hes actually a towering 6 feet 3 inches tall. It was one of those iconic pandemic professional meet-cute moments people joke about, where you find that someone youve virtually known for years looks totally different in person. What wasnt different about Wengrowski in real life was his intense interest and passion for his chosen field. Steganography (pronounced STEG-an-ography, like the Steg in stegasaurus) is a technique for embedding an invisible code into the pixels of an image. Basically, a complex algorithm subtly changes selected pixels in a way thats invisible to human perception. Images look no different after being marked with a steganographic watermark than they did before. Yet, when special software looks at the marked image, the unique code embedded in its pixels comes through clearly to the softwares computerized eyes. The presence of that code lets companies like Steg track a marked image back to its source with extremely high accuracy. Crucially, because the code is embedded directly into the images pixels, its also nearly impossible to remove. Bad actors can easily crop out a physical watermark from an images pixels, or use a tool like Photoshop to scrub data from the images IPTC or EXIF metadata fields. In contrast, because steganographic watermarks live directly in the visual part of the image itself, they travel with the image no matter where it goes. And they survive the most common image-related funny business that nefarious people might try to use to remove them. All steganographic watermarks can survive things that amateur image thieves might try, like aggressive cropping, or even the common practice of taking a screenshot of an image in order to stealthily steal it. But Stegs tech goes even further, Wengrowski told me in an interview. If for example you load an image watermarked by the companys tech on your computer screen, take out your phone, and photograph the physical screen, the companys watermarks will survive in the new image on your phone. Your nefarious copy will remain traceable to the original with Stegs tech. AI Explodes Everything When Wengrowski originally developed Stegs technology, he knew it was cool. And he had a hunch that it was useful for something. But exactly what that something might involve wasnt originally clear. In the early days, Steg slowly grew by helping companies with legal compliance and image protection. Steg would embed its watermarks in copyrighted images, for example, and then trace where those images ended up. If someone stole and used a copyrighted image without permission, Stegs embedded watermarks could be used to prove the theft and could help lead to a legal settlement. The company also worked to safeguard things like pre-release images of a new product. If a company sent top-secret images of a new phone (marked with Stegs tech) to a supplier, for example, and those photos suddenly ended up as a leak in TechCrunch, the company could trace the embedded watermark and know who to blame. That was enough for Steg to grow slowly and steadily improve its tech. Then, in 2022, everything changed. All at once, OpenAI released its Davinci image generation model (remember the avocado chairs?), Midjourney rolled out its then world-beating image generation tech, and Google leaned into image generation within its Bard and later Gemini AI models. Almost overnight, the world was awash in AI images. And very quickly, they became so realistic that everyday people had trouble knowing what was real and what was AI generated. This presented a huge problem for AI companies. They wanted to release their tech far and wide. But they fretted about the potential societal (and legal) consequences if their images were used for deepfakes to deceive people, or even to sway elections. And more broadly, anyone with an interest in the veracity of images suddenly had a huge problem knowing what was real and what was AI-generated. Everything from news reporting to war crimes tribunals rely on imagery as evidence. What happens when that imagery can be quickly and cheaply spun up by an AI algorithm? Yes, AI companies can physically watermark their images (such as by adding a little Gemini star in the lower right), or embed Generated by AI markers in their images metadata. But again, removing those markers is childs play for even the least sophisticated scammers. With AI image generators storming the world, the origins and veracity of every image online was suddenly called into question. Thank You, Mr. President That led to a bizarre situation for any deeply technical person pursuing their random, highly-specific passion in relative obscurity. On October 30, 2023, Wengrowki woke to find that then-president Joe Biden had issued an executive order specifically calling out AI watermarking tech, highlighting it as a crucial factor in national security, and ordering all Federal agencies to use it. Specifically, Bidens order mandated embedding information that is dificult to remove, into outputs created by AI including into outputs such as photos, videos, audio clips, or text for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the output or the identity or characteristics of its provenance, modifications, or conveyance. The order also specifically called for the rapid development of science-back standards and techniques forlabeling synthetic content, such as using watermarking. Biden framed this as mission criticalthe term national security appears 36 times in his executive order. Basically, Biden was mandating the use of tech like steganography, and specifically calling it out from the White House. When that happened, Wengrowski told me, everything went crazy. Since the orderand the corresponding growth of AI imagery more broadlyStegs revenue has increased 500%. Moreover, protecting the integrity of images appears bipartisanWengrowski told me that AI watermarking has been embraced by both the Biden and Trump administrations. In an extremely tight AI job market where top researchers can command eight-figure salaries, Steg now employs five machine learning PHDs devoted to improving its technologies. Although Wengrowski couldnt share his customer list on the record, I can vouch for the fact that its wildly impressive. While keeping its legal compliance and image tracing side alive, Steg has expanded aggressively into the world of cybersecurity and AI image watermarking. For AI companies that want to ply their trade without ruining humanitys trust in visual media, Stegs tech is a lifeline. Companies can embed a steganographic watermark directly into AI images the moment theyre generated. For the life of an image, the code travels with it, even if its reposted, edited or altered. If that image is used as a deepfake or used to manipulate or harass people, the company that created it can quickly read the embedded steganographic watermark in its pixels, definitively label it as a fake, and quickly dispel any damage the image might cause. If youve created an AI image in the last year, youve almost certainly used steganography without even knowing it. Most major AI image generation companies now use the tech. Many use Stegs. And in a world where AI images are so good that they easily fool most detectors (and even trained forensic image analysts), many companies see steganography as the only bulwark against AIs total destruction of any truth still left in the visual world. A Wild Ride For Steg and for Wengrowski personally, its been a wild ride. Right as Biden issued his order, Wengrowski became a father, and now juggles the everyday struggles and joys of a young parent with the rigors of such things as constant travel and testifying in state legislatures. The rise of AI imagery has also revealed some counterintuitive challenges. When Steg first launched, Wengrowski told me, he expected that people would yearn for a technology that could prove whether an image was real or fake. In reality, he was surprised by how little people care. Many people are fine with seeing AI generated content, as long as its funny, informative or otherwise engaging. Whether or not its properly labeled as AI matters very little to them. More pointedly, it matters very little to the social media platforms that disseminate the content, too. Again, though, for the companies who create that contentand who face legal and reputational risk if their tech runs awryit matters an awful lot. Wengrowski tells me that Steg is continuing to improve its tech, making its watermarks even harder to beat. The company is also entering the emerging field of poisoning. New software that Wengrowki showed me invisibly alters images in ways that trip up common deepfake algorithms. If someone tries to turn the poisoned image into a deepfake, it comes out garbled and illegible. The tech works both when images are used for training deepfake models, and when a bad actor tries to create a deepfake of a specific person. The idea is that an influencer, for example, could upload poisoned images of themselves to their social media. The images would look normal to human users. But if someone tried to deepfake the influencer, the poisoned images would thwart them. Wengrowki told me hes especially excited to use the tech to help protect young influencers and teens in general, who are often targeted in abhorrent cyberbullying attacks involving explicit deepfakes. More broadly, though, Wengrowskis story is an inspiring one for anyone grinding away on an as-yet unproven technology, convinced of its value but unsure whether the world will ever see their work. Reflecting on Stegs success, Wengrowski acknowledged that Its probably best to start a business with a clear plan and an understanding of product/market fit. But in his words, Theres also something to be said for knowing a technology is cool, continually improving it even if you have no idea where that will lead, and just trusting that eventually it will have some value for the world. In Stegs case, thats indeed been a winning formula.
Category:
E-Commerce
Many Americans are likely to see massive changes to their taxes in 2026, especially seniors. That’s largely due to President Donald Trumps so-called big, beautiful bill, a massive 940-page bill signed into law over the summer that includes an array of new tax write-offs but also fails to renew some previous deductions from the Biden administration. One change is a $6,000 deduction for seniors. Here’s what to know. Who qualifies for the new senior tax deduction? Trumps tax and spending law introduced a $6,000 deduction for qualifying seniors ages 65 and older, on top of the current additional standard deduction for seniors under existing law. Taxpayers must attain age 65 on or before the last day of the taxable year to be eligible. The $6,000 senior deduction (or $12,000 for a married couple where both spouses qualify) applies to an eligible individual earning up to $75,000 in modified adjusted gross income, or up to $150,000 for joint filers. It is available for both itemizing and non-itemizing taxpayers. Taxpayers must include the Social Security number of the qualifying individual(s) on the return, and file jointly if married, to claim the deduction. How does the deduction impact Social Security? The deduction is meant to offset upcoming federal taxes on Social Security payments. Older taxpayers could be taxed up to 85% based on their combined income, which is calculated based on a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income plus half of their Social Security benefits, according to CNBC. Anything else to know? According to the IRS, the deduction expires at the end of 2028, right before Trump leaves office, making this a temporary deduction effective for tax years 2025 through 2028.
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E-Commerce
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