Newsrooms are shrinking, hedge funds are buying up local papers and clickbait is shaping more and more what you know about the world. What the heck is happening to the news business — and what does this spell for the future of democracy? Journalism professors Jay Rosen and Nikki Usher say the internet isn’t all to blame: Journalists, they argue, need to get more creative about who they reach, what they cover and how they fund their work.
"To prepare tomorrow’s doctors, medical school deans, elected officials, and health care regulators must invest in training that matches the pace and promise of this technology," writes Dr. Robert Pearl.
While colleges across the nation are adapting their curricula to harness the power of generative AI, U.S. medical schools remain dangerously behind.
Most students entering medicine today will graduate without ever being trained to use GenAI tools effectively. That must change. To prepare tomorrow’s doctors – and protect tomorrow’s patients – medical school deans, elected officials, and health care regulators must invest in training that matches the pace and promise of this technology.
Universities embrace AI as medical schools fall behind
Across the country, colleges and universities are reimagining how they educate students in the age of generative AI.
These aren’t niche experiments. They’re part of a sweeping, systems-level transformation aimed at preparing graduates for a rapidly evolving workforce.
Most medical schools, however, have not kept pace. Instead of training students to apply modern tools toward clinical care, they continue to emphasize memorization — testing students on biochemical pathways and obscure facts rarely used in practice.
Early fears about plagiarism and declining academic rigor led many university departments to proceed cautiously after ChatGPT’s release in 2022. But since then, an increasing number of these educational institutions have shifted from policing AI to requiring faculty to incorporate GenAI into their coursework. And the American Federation of Teachers announced earlier this month that it would start an AI training hub for educators with $23 million from tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Medical education remains an outlier. A recent Educause study found that just 14% of medical schools have developed a formal GenAI curriculum, compared to 60% of undergraduate programs. Most medical school leaders and doctors still regard large language models as administrative aids rather than essential clinical tools.
This view is short-sighted. Within a few years, physicians will rely on generative AI to synthesize vast amounts of medical research, identify diagnostic patterns, and recommend treatment options tailored to the latest evidence. Patients will arrive at appointments already equipped with GenAI-assisted insights.
Used responsibly, generative AI can help prevent the 400,000 deaths each year from diagnostic errors, 250,000 deaths from preventable medical mistakes, and 500,000 deaths from poorly controlled chronic diseases. Elected officials and regulators need to support this life-saving approach.
How medical schools can catch up
In the past, medical students were evaluated on their ability to recall information. In the future, they will be judged by their ability to help AI-empowered patients manage chronic illnesses, prevent life-threatening disease complications, and maximize their health.
With generative AI capabilities doubling every year, matriculating medical students will be entering clinical practice equipped with tools over 30 times more powerful than today’s models. Yet few doctors will have received structured training on how to use them effectively.
Modernizing medical education starts with faculty training. Students entering medical school in 2025 will arrive already comfortable using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Most instructors, however, will need to build that fluency.
To close this gap, academic leaders should provide faculty training programs before the start of the next academic year. These sessions would introduce educators to prompt engineering, output evaluation, and reliability assessment. These are foundational skills for teaching and applying GenAI in clinical scenarios.
Once faculty are prepared, schools would begin building case-based curricula that reflect modern clinical realities.
Sample Exercise: Managing chronic disease with GenAI support
In this scenario, students imagine seeing a 45-year-old man during a routine checkup. The patient has no prior medical problems, but on a physical exam, his blood pressure reads 140/100.
First, students walk through the traditional diagnostic process:
Next, they enter the same case into a generative AI tool and compare its output to their own. Where do they align? Where do they differ (and, importantly, why)?
Finally, students design a care plan that incorporates GenAI’s growing capabilities, such as:
This type of training – integrated alongside traditional curriculum – prepares future clinicians to master not just the technology but also understand how it can be used to transform medical care.
A call to government: Empower the next generation of physicians
Medical schools can’t do this alone. Because most physician training is funded through federal grants and Medicare-supported residency programs, meaningful reform will require coordinated leadership from academic institutions, government agencies, and lawmakers.
Preparing future doctors to use GenAI safely and effectively should be treated as a national imperative. Medicare will need to fund new educational initiatives, and agencies like the FDA must streamline the approval process for GenAI-assisted clinical applications.
This month, the Trump administration encouraged U.S. companies and nonprofits to develop AI training programs for schools, educators, and students. Leading tech companies — including Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft — quickly signed on.
If medical school deans demonstrate similar openness to innovation, we can expect policymakers and industry leaders to invest in medical education, too.
But if medical educators and government leaders hesitate, for-profit companies and private equity firms will fill the void. And they will use GenAI not to improve patient care but primarily to increase margins and drive revenue.
As deans prepare to welcome the class of 2029 (and as lawmakers face the growing costs of American health care), they must ask themselves:
Are we preparing students to practice yesterday’s medicine or to lead tomorrow’s?
Dr. Robert Pearl, the author of “ ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
South Novato Library, California
Bay Area community advocates are cautioning community members to be wary of what they see, interact with, and post on social media regarding information about the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and immigration, following a rumor that targeted the Marin County Library.
‘South Novato Library has safe rooms that cannot be accessed by border patrol or ICE without a court order,’ an Instagram story post reads, with photos of a room in the library next to the text alongside the library address. The graphic claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not have the right to enter the pictured room without a court-ordered warrant.
Despite the graphic becoming a popular share among the local community of Novato, a Marin County city located just north of San Francisco, the information is false.
“I am extremely concerned that people have taken the information that I shared in a specific meeting out of context and used it erroneously,” Héctor García, Bilingual Community Library Specialist, said in an email statement.
García believes whoever created the post took information he shared earlier in the year from a meeting in which he relayed information given to the library staff by the county. At the time of the meeting, the staff spaces at the South Novato Library were considered off-limits to ICE agents, he stated.
“Someone took a screenshot of this chat and shared it on their social media,” he said. “However, as we agreed in all our meetings concerning Immigrants Rights and Justice is that everything is changing at a fast speed during this administration and that we need to make sure before sharing that we are not misinforming people.”
South Novato Library’s Media Manager, Andre Clemons, said after looking at the post, a few things stood out to him.
“The quality of the image is not something we would produce, and there is no way to verify this information on who to call, but it did have our address, and it was written in a tone as if we wrote it, but that's not something that we write,” he said.
Clemons says he wishes people would call the library before reposting.
Despite the social media post’s claims, ICE agents do not need a court-ordered warrant to enter the South Novato Library. There is an ongoing investigation over the social media post, according to Clemons.
“The hope will be that we are able to protect our voice from being misused in a way that causes confusion and just creating more fear unnecessarily,” Clemons said.
The post became a popular share on social media platforms during a time of unrest and high tension across California after President Donald Trump’s order in April to go after sanctuary cities that “obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.” Tensions escalated in June when ICE began raiding parts of Los Angeles, and the city began to heavily protest all ICE activity. But it wasn’t just Los Angeles; protests erupted all throughout California in support of the immigrant community.
And for those who didn’t see it on their streets, they saw it on their screens. Social media apps like TikTok and Instagram are used to post sightings, videos of protests, and even videos of people getting detained by ICE.
However, local leaders warn that misinformation is flooding social media platforms at an increasing rate. Lisa Bennett, Executive Director of the nonprofit Multicultural Center of Marin, says misinformation is growing even beyond mainstream social media apps and manifesting in apps like ICEBlock and People over Papers. ICEBlock and People over Papers allow the public to post ICE sightings, confirmed or not.
“It’s difficult [to differentiate between fake and real content], we can’t even differentiate sometimes,” Bennett said. “There are people who do this maliciously, and so I have to look out for that.”
The Multicultural Center of Marin County hosts the Marin Rapid Response Network, a 24-hour hotline that serves immigrants by providing resources and assistance if they are faced with ICE. Bennett says they receive about 10-15 calls a day with people reporting or inquiring about ICE sightings. The network verifies in two ways: by sending trained observers or receiving a call from a community member whose family member has been detained.
Bennett says the most helpful action people can take is to call the Marin Rapid Response Network's 24-hour hotline and relay what they have heard or seen, allowing them to verify the information.
The Multicultural Center of Marin is working to create a mass alert system using its hotline. The hotline will notify the community about ICE's presence and debunk false sightings.
Above all, Clemons and Bennett advise that the community should not repost information regarding ICE without verifying it with the hotline or contacting entities directly, especially if the online content ties entities to specific information, such as the library.
Pricila Flores is a journalist in Northern California. Flores is a UC Santa Barbara alumna with a degree in Language, Culture and Society with a minor in Professional Writing under the Journalism track.
Earlier this summer, I recorded an episode of the Scaling Laws podcast with MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha Schools—schools “where kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills through workshops, and thrive beyond the classroom.” The secret is AI, but likely not the sort of AI that comes to mind.
Students at Alpha Schools work with “adaptive AI” that allows 1:1 learning at the pace necessary to master a subject, moving at the speed of the student’s learning rather than that of the entire class. By relying on AI to set that tempo, the school shaves hours off the traditional classroom model and reallocates that time to activities that allow students to more fully explore their interests, from horseback riding to documentary filmmaking.
This approach also offers far more individualized communication between Alpha’s teachers, or “guides,” and students. Price asserted that guides and students have around two dozen 1:1 meetings over the course of the year. In contrast, she flagged that teachers in traditional classrooms spend an aggregate of a few minutes with each student over the course of a year.
If all of this sounds too good to be true, Price has the evidence to make the case for her approach. She can easily list all the universities that Alpha graduates are headed off to and can quickly share how students have managed incredible knowledge gains in a short amount of time. If pressed, Price will let you know they have troves of empirical data on student success because Alpha is serious about the importance of using data to continually improve their adaptive AI system.
Alpha is available to students in Austin, Miami, and, soon, even more communities. Of course, access to such an innovative and controversial model comes at a price. It’s about $40,000 per year to attend an Alpha School. Unsurprisingly, that price point leaves a lot of families stuck with the traditional model.
Most schools operate as if it were 1975, rather than 2025. Our students are stuck in institutions built in bygone eras and trapped in pedagogical practices that aimed to train reliable factory workers rather than the interdisciplinary and thoughtful leaders we need in the age of AI.
I’m the “fun uncle” or “funcle” to several nieces and nephews. When I catch up with my friends about how these youngsters are doing, I hear about students struggling to get the attention they need to make reliable progress. For instance, my nephew Tommy (not his real name) recently struggled through a math lesson on fractions. Tommy’s teacher, managing 28 other students, had maybe 30 seconds to spend with him before moving on. Tommy fell further behind, his confusion deepening with each passing day.
Meanwhile, on a tablet in the school's unused computer lab, an AI tutor akin to the one used at Alpha sat dormant—one capable of detecting exactly where Tommy’s understanding broke down, adjusting its approach in real-time, and working with him until the concept clicked. The technology to give Tommy what wealthy families have always bought their children—personalized, patient, adaptive instruction—was right there. But school policies, procurement red tape, and institutional inertia kept it locked away.
This scene plays out millions of times daily across America, and it represents something more troubling than inefficiency. We're not just failing to help Tommy learn about improper fractions as well as we could; we're actively choosing to let him struggle when we know exactly how to help him succeed. And Tommy isn't alone. Across education, healthcare, and justice, we're systematically denying ourselves the transformative benefits of artificial intelligence by clinging to institutions designed for a world that no longer exists.
In a few years, it's likely that Tommy's school and schools just like his will get access to a generic version of Alpha's AI tool. Some will say that's soon enough—after all, we cannot expect all schools to overhaul their systems to look more like Alpha's. I say that's a load of hooey. Our charge is to give our students and all future generations the tools required to thrive today and for all foreseeable tomorrows. State education departments spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on each student. Those funds should not continue to subsidize a flawed and antiquated approach to education. As large enterprises, school districts are in a position to bargain with AI companies for discounted tools. They also have the means to train teachers and demand the adoption of new tools.
Will such a change be easy? No. But it is not optional. Progress delayed is progress denied. Each day that Tommy and others are stuck in classrooms of the past, they are missing out on new knowledge and the opportunities afforded by that knowledge.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
Many assume misinformation requires special effects or technical sophistication. In reality, much of it requires only timing, intent, and a caption.
Recently, videos circulated online that appeared to show Los Angeles engulfed in chaos: Marines clashing with protesters, cars ablaze, pallets of bricks staged for violence. The implication was clear, the city had been overtaken by insurrectionists.
The reality was far more contained. Much of the footage was either old, unrelated, or entirely misrepresented. A photo from a Malaysian construction site became “evidence” of a Soros-backed plot. Even a years-old video of burning police cars resurfaced with a new, false label.
This is the oldest trick in the misinformation playbook, and we see it in almost every big breaking news cycle. Use what’s real to distort what’s true. Today, it’s happening faster, fooling more people, and making verification more critical than ever. In our newsroom, we call it the context gap: the space between what a video depicts and what a viewer is led to believe. It’s widening and with it, public trust is eroding.
Many assume misinformation requires special effects or technical sophistication. In reality, much of it requires only timing, intent, and a caption.
Take the example of footage of President Zelensky signing artillery shells. The video was genuine, filmed at a U.S. factory during a 2024 visit. It later resurfaced with captions falsely claiming the shells were destined for Israel. No editing was necessary. The clip looked real, because it was. The framing alone changed the meaning.
This is what makes miscontextualized video so effective. It exploits our instinct to trust what we can see. Viewers may never question the footage, let alone realize they’ve been misled. In some cases, the false framing is intentional, what we call disinformation. In others, the content is shared by people who believe it to be true, that’s misinformation. Whether the deception is deliberate or accidental, the impact is the same: a public less certain of what to trust.
The real danger is not just deception, it’s assumption. When authentic content is misused without warning, it reinforces false narratives while bypassing skepticism entirely. The result isn’t just confusion. It’s confidence in the wrong conclusion.
This kind of manipulation shapes perception in ways that are hard to reverse. Even when corrections are issued later, the original framing often sticks, driving division, fueling misinformation cycles, and distorting how people understand events around the world.
Countering that kind of influence requires more than detection software or fact-checking. It requires a shift in mindset: a habit of slowing down, asking questions, and interrogating the frame, not just the footage. In journalism, we call that constructive skepticism, and right now, we need more of it, beyond the newsroom.
Journalists are trained to question, verify, and triangulate. Verification is not simply a task, it is a mindset. In our newsroom, this means identifying the original upload, analyzing metadata, and confirming time and place through visual context.
Central to that process is skepticism, not as cynicism, but as discipline. Journalistic skepticism means refusing to take visual evidence at face value. It means asking who benefits, what might be missing just outside the frame, and whether a clip has appeared before under a different guise. It’s not about doubting everything. It’s about demanding enough proof to support trust. These practices may be out of reach for most people. Yet the principles behind them are not.
Skepticism, when grounded in evidence, is one of journalism’s most valuable tools. Applied more widely, it can help the public navigate the flood of video and imagery without falling into conspiracy or confusion.
Anyone can adopt a more careful, skeptical approach by asking a few basic questions: Does this look like what it claims to be? Is the source credible or recognizable? Have I seen this before in a different context? These simple checks do not require technical expertise. A moment of hesitation, scaled across a viewing public, could have changed how the wildfire or Zelensky clips were received and shared.
We do not need every viewer to become a verification expert. What we need is a shift in mindset: toward curiosity, caution, and context.
Journalists must continue to treat visual content as seriously as any other source, verifying not just whether something is real, but when and where it was captured, who posted it, and whether it is being presented truthfully.
However, the responsibility does not end there.
Platforms also have a role to play. When old or previously viral footage resurfaces during breaking news, platforms should add the necessary context proactively, not just rely on users to act as de facto fact-checkers. Many major platforms already have content detection systems in place to catch copyright infringements.
The public must also be equipped to pause, question, and seek clarity. Educators and institutions can help foster these habits of verification alongside broader digital access. One of the most overlooked tools in fighting misinformation is not software, but curriculum, training people to interpret the media landscape around them.
We live in an age when anyone can broadcast to the world, with algorithms built to capture and keep attention regardless of veracity or intent. The context gap is not narrowing. It is widening. Every swipe, share, and caption now plays a role in shaping how we see the world—and how others see it too. Slowing down to ask “why this, why now?” may be one of the most powerful tools we have.
James Law is the editor-in-chief at Storyful.
S4 E13. Broken News
