00:00And I believe that there will come a time where we will be very reliant on the AI assistance
00:08to a point where, you know, I think in the previous discussion, people no longer search.
00:15They will ask. It will come at the expense of traffic one day.
00:19And that is something which I think everybody will need to, you know, the industry as a whole, needs to address.
00:24With AI reshaping the media landscape, news outlets must evolve into thought leaders to stay relevant and avoid being left behind,
00:33says FMT Managing Director Azeem Abubakar.
00:36Speaking at the D Conference 2025, hosted by the Malaysian Digital Association,
00:41Azeem said the media can no longer ignore the radical shift in content consumption
00:46as users move from traditional searching to simply asking AI for information.
00:51I believe that we are heading into a game of, from traffic, you know, to thought leadership.
01:00So there's a lot of thought saying that, you know, publishers will get disrupted by AI, you know.
01:05Rather than we become the prey, let's go up the value chain, you know, and power AI instead.
01:12Azeem said AI platforms such as ChatGPT are increasingly dependent on original reporting,
01:18much of which comes from publishers.
01:19ChatGPT now has, you know, two, I would say, engines, right?
01:27One is the 4.0, which it does not give you citations unless you ask for it.
01:33And now you have, you know, O.3, where you can get citations.
01:39So I think one day, it could be a battle of who gets cited the most, right?
01:45To stay ahead, Azeem said FMT is rethinking how it presents information,
01:50focusing on formats that AI prefers, such as explainers and point-form content.
01:55We want to be able to, to some extent, contribute to what AI carries.
02:01And that actually works in our favour as well.
02:04And that's how we get narrative across.
02:06So I think at the end of the day, you know, people, there will be no more SEO, right?
02:11Maybe they will look at AIEO.
02:14And that is something which we want to research on and we are actively looking at.
02:18Media Prima Group Managing Director, Rafik Razali, raised concerns about intellectual property and brand safety,
02:25saying what keeps him up at night is seeing his team's work used to train large AI models without proper credit.
02:32Sometimes it's good to take a step back and to really understand what is it actually that we're doing, right?
02:38What are we trying to impact here?
02:40And I think, you know, all of us here have our responsibilities to ensure that, you know, socially we're doing the right thing.
02:47Nick Justin, Nick Arifin, Head of Group Corporate Communications at Karangkraf,
02:53emphasised the need to preserve trust and journalistic integrity, stressing that human oversight remains essential.
03:00Meanwhile, Diogo Andrade, the APEC Commercial Director at Teeds,
03:04warned of threats to monetisation and credibility posed by fake websites and auto-generated comment bots.
03:11With the rise of Gen.AI and content that doesn't come from a journalistic background,
03:17you see more and more the term, we were talking about this before, the term of premium media being diluted,
03:24and therefore everything is just media, and there seems to be no relevance or importance of having a journalist writing a content piece or value in it,
03:34and I think that's dangerous.
03:35Star Media Group's COO Lydia Wang summed up the new media equation as one of trust, structure, ethics and agency,
03:42urging audiences to stay sceptical and not trust content blindly.
03:47Natasha Bust, FMT.
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