media

AI-generated news anchors to present personalized reports on Channel 1 AI in 2024

A new AI-generated newsroom plans to launch its programming in early 2024, with AI-generated news anchors delivering AI-generated personalized news — what could possibly go wrong?

The media company Channel 1 AI is rolling out a brand new newsroom in 2024, with a catch — it’s powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and manned by AI-generated news anchors who will deliver personalized AI-generated content. 

On Dec. 12, the channel released a teaser video of its upcoming segments on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) with AI-generated news anchors delivering the company’s mission.

The 22-minute pilot introduced the content as “AI native news” and clarified that it would not constitute stories generated by AI, i.e., fake news, but rather take “trusted news sources” from across the globe to gather and synthesize information into its segments. It claims its goal is to provide “accurate, unbiased news.”

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The Agenda podcast chats crypto, media and ethics with Molly Jane Zuckerman

Should crypto media have a universal code of ethics, and what role — if any — should journalists play in promoting crypto mass adoption?

2022 was a rather challenging year for the crypto sector, and the prevalence of Ponzi schemes, decentralized finance scams, nonfungible token rug pulls and questionable centralized exchange bookkeeping put the issue of ethics in the space on blast. 

Of course, the negative news of last year wasn’t an outlier or a one-off — generally, “good” ethics have been an issue in crypto for years, and it’s probably safe to assume that challenges will continue to dot the landscape for the foreseeable future.

Within the context of media, it’s important to recognize that objective, unbiased news reporting and transparency are paramount if the industry is to earn the trust of the wider public and, as a result, change the negative perspectives people often hold about it.

In the latest episode of Cointelegraph’s podcast The Agenda, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung sat down with crypto media vet Molly Jane Zuckerman to discuss her experience with ethics challenges in the industry and her ideas on how to integrate best practices into the sector.

When asked by Salmond about the most important things to fix in crypto media and the potential for journalists to experience a “kind of shadowy pressure to do what’s in the company’s best interest,” Zuckerman suggested that drastic improvements in transparency are needed. She mentioned that the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers, an organization she co-founded, has been working on a standards guidebook to help reporters and news agencies alike:

“It is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, just even outside of my day job, is how do we make sure that people working in crypto have sort of a rule book to follow beyond just what their newsroom might tell you might tell them.”

Zuckerman elaborated:

“I think the issue is if you have access to do something that’s so easy for really big money, it can really tempt a lot of people. So, I think that even people with very, very high moral standards and very clear ethical boundaries — at least I’ve seen this in a few companies I’ve worked for, [they] will purposely not give them access to parts of the site that would tempt them.”

Is the onus of ethics primarily on journalists or protocol builders?

When asked whether crypto’s ethics crisis stems primarily from companies and their profit objectives or from the capacity of journalists to be compromised, Zuckerman suggested that it could be a mixture of both. She also takes issue with the fact that many crypto media outlets and journalists see their mission as to help catalyze mass adoption, saying:

“I don’t think it [crypto media] should help catalyze mass adoption, personally. I think crypto media should just lay bare the facts of what is happening in the space. And I think, unfortunately, right now, if crypto media did a neutral job of that, then most people would probably leave the space because it would just be articles about bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy.”

According to Zuckerman, the true purpose of crypto media is to educate readers: 

“I don’t think that any media outlet should ever have a goal being, like, let’s get more people to use cryptocurrency. I think it should be, let’s get more people to understand how it works. But if they understand how it works and hate it, then that’s the same positive result to me as understanding how it works based on an article you read and liking it.”

To hear more from Zuckerberg, tune in to the full episode of The Agenda on the Cointelegraph Podcasts page, Spotify or Apple Podcasts — and be sure to check out Cointelegraph’s other shows as well.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

US senator calls on SEC’s Gensler to answer for ‘regulatory failures’

Republican Senator Tom Emmer has long been a critic of Gary Gensler and the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission’s cryptocurrency oversight strategy.

Minnesota Senator Tom Emmer has slammed U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler for his flawed “crypto information-gathering efforts,” saying that Gensler should appear before Congress to explain the cost of his “regulatory failures.”

Emmer’s comments came in a Dec. 10 tweet to his 67,500 Twitter followers, where he referred to a bipartisan Blockchain Caucus letter that he co-authored to the SEC chairman on March 16.

Emmer said that “we now know Gensler’s crypto information-gathering efforts were ineffective,” citing the collapses of the Terra ecosystem and crypto platforms Celsius, Voyager and FTX.

“[Gensler] must testify before Congress and answer questions about the cost of his regulatory failures,” the senator added.

He pointed out that Gensler hasn’t appeared before the House Committee on Financial Services since Oct. 5. 2021, leaving crypto media to fill the void for what Emmer described as the SEC’s investigative failures.

Writers of the Blockchain Caucus letter stated the SEC’s efforts in sourcing information from crypto companies were not “targeted, intentional, or clear” but rather “haphazard and unfocused.”

Emmer argued that Gensler’s response — which came two months later — sidestepped several questions enquiring into the methods and processes that the SEC would adopt in providing oversight to the digital asset industry.

“Instead, Gensler decided to explain to Congress the roles of the SEC’s Enforcement and Examination Divisions,” Emmer stated.

Emmer has previously expressed criticism toward the financial watchdog’s crypto oversight strategy.

“Congress shouldn’t have to learn the details about the SEC’s oversight agenda through planted stories in progressive publications,” he stated on Nov. 26.

Related: Republican lawmaker claims SEC chair was coordinating with FTX ‘to obtain regulatory monopoly’

A few days earlier, on Nov. 23, Emmer tweeted that Gensler’s lack of leadership was a contributor to FTX’s catastrophic collapse earlier in the month.

Much of Gensler and the SEC’s efforts over the past years were focused on determining if cryptocurrencies fall within the definition of the Howey test and thus are subject to U.S. securities laws, most notably the ongoing Ripple case with its XRP (XRP) token

Emmer has been a proponent of cryptocurrencies as far back as 2020, taking the view that the U.S. government should clear the way to ensure that it doesn’t stifle innovation in the crypto industry.

Despite endless media appearances, SBF unlikely to testify on 13th

One observer suggested Bankman-Fried may be reluctant to discuss FTX due to the legal implication of lying under oath to the U.S. Congress.

Former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has signaled he’s unwilling to testify before the United States Congress until he’s “finished learning and reviewing what happened.”

Bankman-Fried was responding to a Dec. 2 tweet from U.S. Representative Maxine Waters inviting him to testify in a scheduled U.S. House Committee on Financial Services hearing on Dec. 13 to discuss “what happened” at FTX.

In a Dec. 4 response on Twitter, the former FTX CEO said he feels it is his “duty to appear before the committee and explain,” but only once he’s “finished learning and reviewing what happened,” adding he wasn’t “sure” whether it would happen by the 13th. 

Some in the community pointed out the response appears out of line with his recent actions, including taking part in several media interviews and posting endless tweets about what led to the fall of FTX in November.

Blockchain Association Head of Policy and U.S. Attorney Jake Chervinsky suggested to his 120,500 Twitter followers that Bankman-Fried was reluctant to take part in the Dec. 13 hearing because ‘”lying to Congress under oath is less appealing.”

On Nov. 30, Bankman-Fried made his first live public appearance since the collapse of FTX during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit where he was questioned over the circumstances behind the crypto exchange’s demise. A day later, he appeared in a Good Morning America interview, and also in a Twitter space hosted by IBC Group founder and CEO Mario Nawfal.

Most recently, Bankman-Fried was questioned by Coffeezilla in a Twitter Spaces interview on Dec. 3, which saw him leaving the interview around 20 minutes in. 

Related: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried denies ‘improper use’ of customer funds

Meanwhile, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has called out Bankman-Fried’s purported narrative in recent days, stating on Dec. 3 that “even the most gullible person” should not believe Bankman-Fried’s claim that FTX’s transfer of billions of dollars of customer funds to its trading firm Alameda Research came from the result of an unintentional “accounting error.”

As for SBF’s recent media antics, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk “agreed” with a member of the crypto community SBF doesn’t deserve any more media attention until his court date, with Musk adding he needs an “adult timeout.”


Despite endless media appearances, SBF unlikely to testify on Dec. 13

One observer suggested Bankman-Fried may be reluctant to discuss FTX due to the legal implication of lying under oath to the U.S. Congress.

Former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has signaled that he’s unwilling to testify before the United States Congress until he’s “finished learning and reviewing what happened.”

Bankman-Fried was responding to a Dec. 2 tweet from U.S. Representative Maxine Waters inviting him to testify in a scheduled U.S. House Committee on Financial Services hearing on Dec. 13 to discuss “what happened” at FTX.

In a Dec. 4 response on Twitter, the former FTX CEO said he feels it is his “duty to appear before the committee and explain,” but only once he’s “finished learning and reviewing what happened,” adding he wasn’t “sure” whether it would happen by Dec. 13. 

Some in the community pointed out the response appears out of line with his recent actions, including taking part in several media interviews and posting endless tweets about what led to the fall of FTX in November.

Blockchain Association head of policy and U.S. Attorney Jake Chervinsky suggested to his 120,500 Twitter followers that Bankman-Fried was reluctant to take part in the Dec. 13 hearing because “lying to Congress under oath is less appealing.”

On Nov. 30, Bankman-Fried made his first live public appearance since the collapse of FTX during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, where he was questioned over the circumstances behind the crypto exchange’s demise. A day later, he appeared in a Good Morning America interview and also in a Twitter space hosted by IBC Group founder and CEO Mario Nawfal.

Most recently, Bankman-Fried was questioned by Coffeezilla in a Twitter Spaces interview on Dec. 3, which saw him leaving the interview around 20 minutes in. 

Related: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried denies ‘improper use’ of customer funds

Meanwhile, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has called out Bankman-Fried’s purported narrative in recent days, stating on Dec. 3 that “even the most gullible person” should not believe Bankman-Fried’s claim that FTX’s transfer of billions of dollars of customer funds to its trading firm Alameda Research came from the result of an unintentional “accounting error.”

As for SBF’s recent media antics, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk “agreed” with a member of the crypto community SBF doesn’t deserve any more media attention until his court date, with Musk adding he needs an “adult timeout.”


Crypto Twitter unhappy with SBF ‘puff piece’ pushed by mainstream media

While SBF refuses to interact with Crypto Twitter, he was featured in New York Times trying to explain the sequence of events that led to the fall of FTX.

When the world realized that Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried had seemingly committed fraud when building his FTX empire, fellow entrepreneurs, investors and long-time believers unanimously acknowledged the damage caused to the credibility of the crypto ecosystem. On the other hand, some mainstream media outlets — which have predominantly attacked crypto via negative speculations — have seemingly taken sides with SBF while paying little to no heed to the losses exceeding billions of dollars incurred by the general public.

While SBF refuses to interact with Crypto Twitter, the same community he once called home, he was featured in a New York Times article on Nov. 14 in which he tries to explain the sequence of events that led to the fall of the crypto exchange FTX. However, the article’s tone did not resonate with many in the crypto community, with some accusing the NYT of being biased given SBF’s strong ties with United States politics.

As pointed out by Bloomberg journalist Trung Phan, the “puff piece on SBF” fails to mention the potential fraud and crimes committed by the entrepreneur. Instead, the NYT chose to report an angle no one expected.

Several crypto entrepreneurs — including Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt, angel investor Balaji Srinivasan and billionaire Elon Musk — openly criticized the NYT, saying it was trying to change the narrative. Wyatt tweeted at the author of the article, stating that SBF committed significant financial crimes, adding:

“It’s just a disservice to all of those impacted, and it’s disheartening to see all of this just skimmed over like he made a simple mistake.”

Srinivasan accused the New York Times of covering up the crimes committed by Sam Bankman-Fried. “Nothing SBF says can be trusted. Nothing NYT says can be trusted either,” said Srinivasan while asking Crypto Twitter to mass block the media outlet for allegedly spreading disinformation.

Musk, the talk of the town, also shared the same feelings, asking a simple question on his recently purchased social media platform:

“Why the puff piece @nytimes?”

At a time when entrepreneurs are trying to remediate the destruction caused to the crypto ecosystem, the community is keeping a close eye on what mainstream media reports. It is important to note that other mainstream media outlets — such as CNBC, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal — have had more balanced reporting on the actions of SBF and their significant harm.

Related: FTX collapse could see crypto sector layoffs accelerate

In a recent ask-me-anything (AMA) session conducted on Nov. 14, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao asked investors to take responsibility for their investment decisions instead of purely blaming bad actors like FTX.

“As a user, you also have responsibility — you can’t just blame all of the responsibility to other people. When bad things happen, if you blame all of the responsibility, if it’s always to other people, you will never be successful,” CZ explained.

CZ hits back at claims Binance is a Chinese company

The Binance founder has also detailed some personal and business-related challenges he had to overcome from the Chinese government, even before the launch of Binance in 2017.

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has hit back at critics and conspiracy theorists who claim Binance to be a Chinese-based “criminal entity” that “secretly [belongs] in the pocket of the Chinese government.”

CZ’s response to critics came from a Thursday blog post via Binance, and stems from a Twitter spat with a former Washington Post journalist who asked him, “While I have you here, who’s Guangying Chen?”

He explained that the question is in reference to a conspiracy theory alleging that his personal friend and Chinese national Guangying Chen is the secret owner of Bijie Tech (a company he founded in 2015) and possibly also Binance.

However, CZ explains that Chen is a colleague of his that he met through a friend, which he hired to “manage the back office” at Bijie Tech before re-hiring her again at Binance, adding that conspiracy theorists then linked her as a secret owner of the firms given that she was one of the few to have initially remained in China.

Websites such as Scam Binance allege that Chen at one stage owned 93% of the shares in both Bijie Tech and Binance, among other things. CZ stated that such rumors originated from an “old campaign that a competitor launched via an anonymous microsite.”

“As a result, both she and her family have been targeted and harassed by the media and online trolls. Had I known how much of a negative impact this would have on her life, I never would have asked her to do what seemed like such an innocuous step at the time,” he said.

Links to China

CZ also strongly denied the claims that his company has close links to China and its government, and even went as far as discussing some of his troubling personal and business-related experiences with Chinese authorities:

“The greatest challenge that Binance faces today is that we (and every other offshore exchange) have been designated a criminal entity in China. At the same time, our opposition in the west bends over backward to paint us as a ‘Chinese company.’”

CZ is of the view that the ill-intended inferences come from the fact that he, along with a few other Binance employees are of Chinese ethnicity, making Binance “an easy target for special interests, media, and even policymakers that hate our industry.”

“The inference is that because we have ethnically Chinese employees, and perhaps because I am ethnically Chinese, we are secretly in the pocket of the Chinese government,” he said.

Views to that effect have been expressed by the media as recently as of Tuesday, with a Fortune India article describing Binance as a “Chinese-origin[ed] crypto exchange,” which claimed Binance and other Chinese-linked centralized crypto exchanges were “invading” India by freely operating their services within India through illegal means.

Chinese-infiltrated narratives continue to spread despite Binance never being legally incorporated in China and never operating like a Chinese company culturally, said CZ.

CZ added that Binance has subsidiaries in a number of countries, such as France, Spain, Italy, UAE and Bahrain, and has grown a team around the globe, adding that “we are active in pursuing top talent, no matter where they hail from:”

“Over the past two years, as we expanded into Europe and the Middle East and recruited a more senior leadership team, Binance’s executive team is now more heavily dominated by Europeans and Americans.”

“Our broader employee base is even more globally distributed. Despite these facts, some people insist on calling us a ‘Chinese company,’” he added.

Having fled from China to Canada at 12, CZ later returned to start a company in 2015, but was later shut down by the Chinese government:

“Two years before Binance, I started a company called Bijie Tech, providing exchange-as-a-service platforms to other exchanges. We got 30 clients on board, and business was good […] Unfortunately, in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down all such exchanges. All of our clients went out of business.”

CZ said that he brought a few past Bijie Tech employees in to launch Binance in July 2017. However, the Chinese government again effectively shut it down six weeks later by issuing a memorandum stating that crypto exchanges were not allowed to operate in China, adding:

“They then blocked our platform behind the Great Firewall. At this point, most of our employees left China. Only a small number of customer service agents remained by late 2018.”

Related: Binance CEO sues Bloomberg subsidiary alleging defamation

Binance was legally incorporated in Cayman Islands in 2017, but currently has no formalized headquarters.

As of October 2021, Binance had accumulated an estimated 28.6 million crypto users, making it the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange. In November 2021, a former Binance executive said the company is worth over $300 million.

Tether responds to Wall Street Journal ‘disinformation’

To attack Tether’s reserves […] further highlights an agenda by the publication to single out Tether and hurt its reputation,” the USDT issuer said.

Tether Holdings Limited has clapped back at The Wall Street Journal over an article it claims spread “false information” about the stablecoin issuer’s profitability, solvency and accounting standards. 

In a Monday article, the Journal claimed that Tether could be deemed “technically insolvent” if its assets fell just 0.3%. That conclusion was drawn from Tether’s reported assets and liabilities as of Thursday. One week prior, Tether published its latest attestation showing $67.7 billion of reported assets against $67.5 billion of liabilities.

The August attestation was conducted by BDO Italia, the Italian arm of international accounting firm BDO Global. As Cointelegraph reported, Tether hired BDO Italia to increase the legitimacy and transparency of its attestations. In the process, the stablecoin issuer upped the frequency of its reporting from quarterly to monthly.

“The article seeks to discredit the work that Tether has put into transparent and honest communication to the public,” Tether said in a Tuesday blog post. “BDO, a very reputable and independent Top 5 audit firm, is not a “Tether accounting firm,” as erroneously written by the WSJ.”

In the blog post, Tether refuted the Journal’s claims that its exposure to short-term U.S. Treasury bills is an unsafe strategy. Tether also clapped back at assumptions that its business is unprofitable:

“According to our Consolidated Reserves Report, Tether has never disclosed any equity despite being profitable for several years. This same report has been deemed appropriate by important stakeholders and it has been accepted by the NYAG. Perhaps the WSJ has confused Tether with some of its competitors.”

Related: Tether fortifies its reserves: Will it silence critics, mollify investors?

As the crypto market’s oldest and largest stablecoin issuer, Tether is no stranger to criticism. Detractors hav long claimed that Tether’s USDT stablecoin is not adequately backed by reserves. Others have criticized the company’s use of commercial paper as backing. On June 27, The Wall Street Journal reported that short sellers have been “ramping up their bets against Tether” after the collapse of the Terra (Luna) — now renamed Terra Classic (LUNC) — ecosystem.