Dr Alex Connock is a Senior Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and recently wrote a textbook on media and AI. He discussed AI through in the context of media perception with John Maxwell Hobbs.
Connock’s broadcasting background is practical as well as academic, having co-founded the indie Ten Alps with Bob Geldof in the late 90s and was the Managing Director of Endemol Shine North through 2017.
An explosion of interest in AI
Connock felt that AI’s major impact on the media landscape was getting short shrift in academia and set out to correct that. “The textbook is guide to media, reframing how you might see it in the 2020s. I was struck when teaching the subject that there really wasn’t a textbook that described the media that people actually live and work in today,” he said. “Most of the textbooks were framed around a rather 1980s vision, with a series of articles about things like exhibition, publishing, and agencies with no relation to, firstly, the way it is structured now with social networks, and streamers, and podcasters. Secondly, they didn’t really have any recognition of the technology that was defining who the biggest media players actually are: AI - in particular recommendation algorithms.”
“What was interesting when I pitched it in 2020,” he continued, “Is that Rutledge sent it off to...
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