When stories become liquid
AI can pour any story into any format. Plus: the spyware industry zeroes in on journalists.
AI, arguably, makes content infinitely malleable. Google NotebookLM really put the idea on the map—give it a file, it creates a podcast. The idea can enable media companies and content creators remix any story into any other format on demand. It’s a compelling idea, and products are emerging to do it well, and at scale. But moving it from theory to practice has complications, and this week’s column explores them.
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Why liquid content is harder than it looks
A concept making the rounds in AI circles is something called “liquid content.” The shorthand describes the act of reshaping facts, ideas, and expressions across mediums. The most well-known example is a feature within Google’s NotebookLM: Once you’ve filled a folder with various kinds of data, it can whip up a podcast about that data, enlisting a couple of cheery AI-generated voices to give you an overview, analysis, or debate.
Push the idea to its limit and you arrive at a vision where any piece a media company produces can flow into every other format on demand. Making a podcast? With the right tools and prompting, in mere minutes, it can be reimagined as a series of clips, a feature article, or even an interactive presentation. And for a traditional news publisher, the same archive of articles can fuel videos that previously got benched as too costly to bother with.
This is no longer a thought experiment. At recent industry conferences, including the NAB Show and Adobe Summit, tools that can intelligently translate one format into another are showing up all over the floor. Amagi demonstrated an AI system that can scan a live newscast, understand the different stories covered, and create short-form videos for each one on the fly. Stringr’s Genna system can take any news article and turn it into a video, pulling photos and licensed clips from repositories like Getty to assemble the footage.
Repurposing isn’t new. But now that AI can do most of the heavy lifting, interpreting the content, deciding how it’s best expressed in a new form, and pulling all the levers to do the actual work, the work moves faster, costs less, and scales in ways that weren’t possible before. Treat it like a magic growth engine, though, and you’ll trip over the parts the demo skipped.
Read the rest at mediacopilot.ai
The Chatbox
All the AI news that matters to media*
Spyware industry zeroes in on journalists
Press freedom is contracting at a pace the International Federation of Journalists compared to the most unstable periods of the 20th century, with 128 journalists killed in 2025 and the surveillance toolkit aimed at the rest expanding fast. The IFJ’s World Press Freedom Day report flags commercial spyware including Pegasus, Predator, and Graphite as widely available beyond their original government markets, and capable of zero-click intrusions that compromise a phone without the target ever tapping a thing. UNESCO data cited in the report shows global press freedom has fallen 10% since 2012. For newsrooms, the implication is operational: source protection now demands threat modeling that assumes adversaries can read everything, and editors have to bake device hygiene into reporting routines instead of leaving it to the security desk. (AI-assisted)
*AI-assisted news items are drafted with AI and then carefully edited by Media Copilot editors.
As someone trying to use these tools day-to-day, this is exactly where it breaks. The first output feels like magic. The third one feels repetitive. By the tenth, I’m editing more than I saved. The promise is “scale your voice.” The reality is “clean up ten versions of something you didn’t fully want.”