The objection itself has been overruled. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup sought to disrupt journalism by creating a court in which reporters would be dragged into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by people unhappy with their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, focusing on a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by expertise in a large language model.
Objection’s CEO is Aaron D’Souza, the businessman provocateur behind the enhanced Games, known as the “Steroid Olympics,” who first gained notoriety as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s attempt to finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy lawsuit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.
The first objection court, in April, targeted Hollywood Reporter For our 2021 coverage of the heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortunes were built on OxyContin. D’Souza said in an interview: THR “Many journalists are stronger than billionaires,” he explains, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in tears about ruining their lives with one article.”
D’Souza and CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot, Objection’s chief technology officer — who met in Oxford, where they first founded the laundry service in 2018 — admitted they found it difficult to build proprietary software that couldn’t be accused of producing sloppy justice. “AI-based inference models are easy compared to adjudicating judgments,” D’Souza said. (The objection concerns itself before a ruling is issued on it THRcourt .)
Since then, D’Souza and Grant Talbot have resolved their dilemma by determining, as Objection’s home page now reads in AI-driven English, that “judgments punish failure. They don’t fix the incentive. They don’t fix the root cause.” Ergo: The Primary, “a powerful public methodology that scores, ranks, and indexes journalists according to the accuracy of their reporting.”
The company’s founders lay out their latest thinking in a white paper, as well as the metrics they decided their AI model should weigh to determine journalistic credibility — a balance between factors including source attribution, tone of coverage, and right of reply. Primary media are classified as well as individual journalists.
D’Souza detailed Objection’s transformation into The Primary in an email he sent to him THR On July 15th.
“This is less pivotal than it appears from the outside,” his note began. “The question I’ve been chasing since I ran the Gawker litigation strategy more than a decade ago is how journalism is valued at all. Markets reward attention. Awards recognize a small piece of work. For the individual reporter, there’s nothing in between those two. The objection was one attempt at that question — an attempt at execution. The primary is the second attempt at the same question, and I think it’s the right one. What turned it from an idea into something urgent was watching it happen for me. Rebecca Bellan interviewed me for TechCrunch this spring and I published it. In a matter of hours, the AI systems read it, compressed it, and moved on. The economic value of the press was taken away by the machine in a single afternoon, and no arbitration could fix it.
D’Souza described The Primary’s business as “pre-revenue” — its revenue generation model “is a decision in front of us” — and pushed back on the idea that Objection simply couldn’t build a trustworthy arbitration system, as he felt it could get behind it. (Or at least a court that would satisfy its paying clients.) “The court succeeded,” he wrote. “This is not manipulation; this is exactly why we act. What we have learned is that judgment is an enforcement tool, and enforcement changes behavior only at the margins of occurrence. It arrives after the damage, in the small number of cases that someone has the resources and appetite to deliver. It has nothing to say to the overwhelming majority of reports, which no one disputes. Every case we took pointed to the same thing below, and the journalists were not bad – it was the discipline behind the story. It was never measured at the level of the reporter who wrote it, and what cannot be measured is not It’s paid for, you can’t file a lawsuit to find a solution, you have to build the missing tool.
So far, Jeff Bezos The Washington Post And David Ellison’s CBS News tops the rankings in The Primary from a small group indexed primary, with a rating Daily Mail The tabloid received its lowest overall score ever. A group of Reuters reporters occupy the top spots among individuals – led by Rajesh Kumar Singh, its correspondent who covers US aviation. Notable writers with the lowest scores include magazine columnists Cindy Adams New York Post And Mark Halperin from Daily Mailas well as the artificial intelligence beating journalists Mike Isaacs and Kid Metz in New York Times. (THR Its employees have not yet been classified.)
D’Souza insisted THR That primary scorecard would have a beneficial impact on journalism. “A reporter who spent fifteen years doing slower, harder, better-sourced work never had a portable public record to prove it—something they could take to an editor, owner, or competitor,” he wrote. “And now they do. And that’s how the incentives work: not by shaming anyone, but by making the alternative clear enough that someone will eventually pay for it.”
The “Primary” is not the first to establish itself as a supervisory body over monitoring bodies. Two decades ago, the nonprofit NewsTrust launched, which saw staff evaluate stories. Then, in 2016, came the automated browser extension The Factual, followed three years later by Credder, an effort that calls itself “rotten tomatoes” in the press. Nothing remains in the process.
