Do you decide what you read? We have news for you

July 12, 2026 — 9:30am

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The saying goes that if it’s free, you’re the product. In the artificial intelligence age, I’m starting to wonder what kind of product we are being fashioned into.

A little while ago, I started to notice that other people – always other people, not me, of course – were completely unaware of things that had happened. Missing large chunks of information, their reality was significantly distorted. It was no longer just a matter of having different perspectives on the same thing. We seemed to be living in completely different dimensions, intersecting on only a skeleton of mutually known facts. Obviously, they weren’t reading widely enough.

So I created a version of a US project I’ve found thought-provoking. Ground News compiles the main stories running across the North American media and provides the reader with a visual that illustrates whether the story is being reported evenly across left- to centre- to right-leaning media, or mostly on one end of the spectrum or the other. I instructed Claude AI, an artificial intelligence platform, to create a top-line version for Australia.

I expected it to be a helpful tool to demonstrate how ignorant people were of what was being said outside their echo chambers and algorithmic bubbles. But I didn’t expect that I would be one of those people. Every week since I started it, the scheduled newsletter has shown me something I had completely missed – and often a framing that simply wasn’t present in the outlets I was reading.

Claude and I settled on 14 media outlets to include – I’ve since increased that to 19. On the centre-left, it nominated ABC News, Guardian Australia, The Saturday Paper and Crikey, among others. On the centre-right, the Herald Sun, The Daily........

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