As it’s a public holiday, I’m going to take a step back and just work backwards to the July update.
Typically, on the first day of every new month, I’d push out a list of best-ofs for the previous month and, with it, some thoughts.
I missed doing that this time round since August kicked off with a bang.
I’m capping off close to two years of the newsletter being my main grift.
And I was thinking: what next? These days, the cap I wear is that of the entrepreneur, and not the journalist.
And, as many of you know, being an entrepreneur is a nice way of saying, “I’m a hamster on a wheel.”
You either keep running or exit by flying off the wheel and crashing.
There are a lot of opinions on using AI to write.
Editorial folk, that is journalists, are crucified for using AI to do anything.
It’s taboo. A grave sin.
Substack, the platform I use, has even integrated Pangram’s AI detector for writers and readers.
Substack also has a disable-AI function, which I find pointless, but any form of helping us be true to ourselves is welcomed, even if not 100% foolproof.
But here’s the lay of the land.
Corporate money, from advertising to shilling, remains the number one source of income for anyone doing content.
Influencers, content creators, podcasters and the like, including some newsrooms, are more tolerant to such demands, because it involves things like pretending a piece of content is organic or driven purely by editorial instincts.
(We are good actors. Didn’t you know?)
So they get the bulk of the spend.
To churn so-called business-friendly content, many personalities use AI to generate their scripts, and with it their line of thinking.
I’m not talking about the small ones, but the biggest ones you know and can think of.
It doesn’t take much to pinpoint them, and when you take a step back, you’d realise that their prose, cadence, et al are just AI-generated.
More importantly, there’s a huge tolerance for non-journalists to use AI and read off an AI script then a journalist, despite both doing the same thing.
Even better, you can earn a lot of money with sponsored content when you read from an AI script.
It doesn’t diminish your value, as long as you have your followers — real or farmed (yes, this is a thing) — to like, comment and repost.
So how?
Some will say it’s about trust.
But I know very well that a lot of people use trust to hide their love for free-to-read-or-view content.
With the bulk of funds outside the newsroom, should the few of us so-called idealists still hold on to our dying beliefs, all the more poorer?
Writing in your own voice is hard work. I don’t consider myself a belletrist or redactor extraordinaire.
With AI, you can push out content like there’s no tomorrow without worrying about how you sound in the finished product.
Just read, publish and cash out.
I was chatting with a few journalists and the only reason we’ve not turned on that same switch is because we are just uneasy. We are scared.
We toy with AI, tinker with our Claudes and DeepSeeks, and just love the endless possibilities for us to have a so-called “assistant” to lighten our load, while we bum around meet sources.
But, gosh, the terror of using it wholesale to publish! We’ll be cancelled!
In holding on to our voice and perhaps thinking, I can only hope those of us who remain do not end up like the famous Motown bass player James Jamerson.
He doubled down on his fingerstyle as the now-famous slap-and-pop took over, and eventually faded with fewer gigs in his later years.
There was his alcoholism, which also plagues some of our newsmen, but we won’t go there today.
The point still stands. Among the reasons Jamerson became unpopular was that he resisted picking up something new and trendy.
He died a starving artist, only appreciated posthumously for his legendary contributions to R&B.
I doubt AI is the slap-pop of content or journalism. But that’s me. And I really hope I’m not wrong.
And, as tradition demands of me, here are July’s top reads.
These are articles that drew around 3,000 views and converted at least 10 paying subscribers (monthly/annual/founding) each:
A peek at Malaysia’s draft AI bill. This was the precursor to the country’s first AI bill, its powers and loopholes. A true blue “inside scoop”.
Malaysia gets a ‘new’ sovereign wealth fund. KWAN is now a proper sovereign wealth fund, but with the finance minister empowered to appoint and remove board members and approve investment strategy, are we seeing glimpses of another 1MDB?
The homework KWAP didn’t do. KWAP put US$30 million into eFishery’s Series D for a 2.51% stake but, now, with the fraud exposed and the founder jailed, how much the civil servants’ pension fund can recover is anyone’s guess. The real question is why KWAP went in directly and who nudged it there.
Why Syed Mokhtar needs a man from Dubai. Controversial Sultan Ahmed Sulayem, who quit Dubai’s DP World in February after the Epstein files disclosures, is MMC Port’s executive chairman. Did Putrajaya agree to the appointment?
EPF’s Care Concierge deal is back on? Unpacking one of the biggest back-and-forths in VC: EPF-Gobi’s investment in eldercare firm Care Concierge. And a peek into the goings-on at the EPF’s strategic investments division.