NYTimes Increases REAL AI Harms w/Outdated "Standards" as Ezra Distracts w/AI Doomer B.S.

A nine-minute video, uploaded on 8 October 2026, in which Carl Brown says this time his complaint isn’t AI hype. It’s something more basic: big news organisations won’t do the easy thing and show where their material comes from, and that makes it far harder for anyone trying to check them.

His example is Ezra Klein’s half-hour video essay for The New York Times, “Why Are We Sprinting Off the A.I. Cliff?”. Brown maps it section by section. About a third of the runtime, roughly nine minutes, is clips and screenshots from elsewhere, and none is linked: not in the description, not in the transcript. The description’s own link to the transcript was broken when he recorded, and the one working link went to a page of podcast book recommendations. What passes for attribution is three end screens listing three AI companies, four TikTok channels, eight news organisations, four YouTube channels, six X accounts and assorted stock libraries, in no order. He anticipates the reply that it’s opinion, not news: someone using a huge platform to push policy owes us the basis, and a Times news video on the National Weather Service does no better. It has three credited fact-checkers. Adding links would be trivial.

His reason it matters now is deepfakes, real and current, not the superintelligence kind. He cites Reporters Without Borders on a hundred deepfakes impersonating journalists, and AI attack ads in this year’s Texas races for Senate and lieutenant governor. If anyone can fake a clip of anyone, the only defence is being able to trace every clip and quote to where it came from. Brandolini’s law (refuting nonsense costs an order of magnitude more than making it) is worse when the biggest outlets don’t show their work. He tells viewers to say so in the Times’s comments and its feedback form.