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A great, fictional man once declared: “I believe virtually everything I read.” David St. Hubbins, lead singer and guitarist of Spinal Tap, mocked the earnest confidence of rock stars in the same way AI futurists are now mocking critical thinking itself. Right now, most of the tech industry has adopted St. Hubbins’ line without the irony. Google is embedding AI into Chrome. Tech leaders are declaring the end of websites. Hundreds of links will collapse into single answers, traffic will disappear, the open web gets hollowed out. The future belongs to whoever wins inclusion in the AI’s response, not whoever builds the best site. Sigh. We spent the last decade learning that you can’t believe everything on Facebook. Now we’re about to make the same mistake with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Clean story. Wrong conclusion. It assumes people will stop thinking critically about information just because it arrives in a prettier package. Same Problem, New Wrapper The fake news crisis taught us something: Polished presentation doesn’t equal reliable information. Nice formatting, confident tone, and shareable graphics do not come with a guarantee of truth. We had to relearn basic media literacy. Check the source. Understand methodology. Look for bias. Read multiple perspectives. Think critically. Now answer engines arrive with a seductive promise: “Don’t worry about all that. Just trust what we tell you. This is fake news 2.0. The Work Slop Warning Harvard Business Review documented what happens when people stop interrogating AI outputs. They call it “workslop, content that looks professional but lacks substance. Polished slides, structured reports, articulate summaries that are incomplete, missing context, and often wrong. Employees now spend two hours on average cleaning up each instance. One described it as “creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society.” Another said: “I had to waste time checking it with my own research, then waste more time redoing the work myself.” This is what happens when we outsource critical thinking. The polish looks good. The substance isn’t there. Someone downstream pays the price. If AI can’t reliably produce good work internally, where context and accountability exist, why would we blindly trust it externally, where neither exists? High Stakes Require Verification Imagine your doctor uses an AI summary for your diagnosis. Your lawyer relies on ChatGPT for contract advice. Your financial advisor trusts Gemini’s recommendations without checking. You’d demand they verify, right? Check sources. Show methodology. Prove they’re not just accepting whatever the algorithm says. Medical decisions, legal issues, financial choices, and safety concerns all require source transparency. You need to see the work. You need context. You need to verify. A chat interface doesn’t change that fundamental need. It just makes it easier to skip those steps. The existence of these facts points to a clear, yet countercultural conclusion. Websites Aren’t Going Anywhere Yes, discovery patterns are changing. Yes, traffic shifts. Yes, AI surfaces some content while burying others. That doesn’t make websites obsolete. It makes them more important. The sites that die will deserve it: SEO farms gaming algorithms, content mills producing garbage. The sites that survive will offer what compressed answers can’t: verifiable sources, transparent methodologies, deep context that can’t be summarized without losing meaning. When fake news dominated social media, the solution wasn’t “stop using sources.” It was “get better at evaluating them.” Same thing here. Answer engines are a new entry point, not a replacement for verification. The smart response to an AI answer isn’t “thanks, I believe you.” It’s “interesting, now let me dig deeper.” We’re Not That Lazy The “websites are dead” thesis assumes something bleak: that humans will stop being curious, critical, and careful about information that matters. That we’ll just accept whatever Google tells us. People want to understand things deeply, not just know the answer. They want to form opinions, not inherit them from algorithms. They want to verify claims when stakes are high. That requires going to sources. Comparing perspectives. Thinking critically instead of letting technology think for you. You can’t do all of that in a chat window. The Bar Just Got Higher AI answer engines aren’t killing websites. They’re exposing which ones were never worth visiting. The question isn’t whether websites survive. It’s whether your website offers something an algorithm can’t: real expertise, transparent sources, and content valuable enough that people want the full story, not just the summary. We learned this with fake news. Now we’re learning it again with answer engines. Trust, but verify. Always verify.
Category:
E-Commerce
A self-described rat pack of five food-loving journalists just bought the trademark to the defunct food magazine Gourmet, updated it for the modern reader, and brought it back as an online newsletterall without consulting the magazines former publisher, Condé Nast. And if you didn’t know that already, you might’ve been able to guess it from the publication’s new wordmark. The logo looks nothing like what you’d expect from the magazine that shuttered in 2009. Instead of a crisp, delicate script, this wordmark is unapologetically blocky, chunky, and weird. It’s more reminiscent of forgotten sheet pan drippings: certainly not pretty too look at, but more delicious than you’d expect. Introducing the modern Gourmet: Its pithy, recipe-obsessed, and designed for the home chef whos sick of brightly lit photos of one-pan dinners. Gourmet on the newstand, ca. 2009. [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images] A new, Substack-era food mag with no interest in being a crowd-pleaser The idea to bring back the magazine began when former Los Angeles Times writer and Gourmet cofounder Sam Dean noticed something strange. He called me and was like, Dude, I think I just figured something out,'” says graphic designer Alex Tatusian, another of the brands cofounders. “‘I’m on the U.S. Trademark Office site, and I’m pretty sure that Condé forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet. Tatusian and Dean found three other collaborators, formed an LLC, and bought the trademark for a few thousand dollars. The creatives behind Gourmet follow in the footsteps of several other journalists and writers who have recently departed the endlessly beleaguered realm of traditional media in favor of their own self-published ventures. These include worker-owned shops like Hell Gate, Defector, and 404 Media, as well as food-based titles like Vittles and Best Food Blog, and even individual food creators like Molly Baz and Claire Saffitz. In the Gourmet founders’ opening salvo to readers, they propose that legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, and diluted their missions in the process. I think what Ive seen in food media are these dual forces: The recipes have become more relatable or lowest common denominator, but its being put in these very shiny packages,” says cofounder Nozlee Samadzadeh. [Image: Gourmet] So in lieu of clicky 10 minute recipes with flash photography, Gourmets founders want to make work for an audience that really, really enjoys food: long, reported features on Gavin Newsoms Napa wine empire; odes to baked rice pudding; and manifestos for people who are sick of easy dinners. (And it wont appeal to everyone.) Tatusian calls todays Gourmet, which is available on the open source platform Ghost with a $7 monthly subscription, a transmogrified version of the original. Given its limited resources, its embracing an unapologetically craft-focused, funky, punk-rock approach designed for the modern newsletter resurgence. In short, its a wholesale rejection of the highly produced, SEO-optimized content thats come to dominate the modern food media space. Gourmet’s ‘shit-stirring energy’ takes aim at expected design taste Looking through Gourmets new site feels a bit like being bombarded with a series of ingredients that dont entirely go together. And for the publication’s general premise, that makes an odd kind of sense: Its a group of young people, reviving a magazine that was once mainly for the wealthy elite, in an accessible format and on a shoestring budget. You look at old Gourmet and there’s black letter Gothic text, and script, and cursive, and, God, they want you to be rich, you know what I mean? Tatusian says. It has such a classist energy. I think there’s something about that that we both want to celebrate, because it is beautiful and it is the history of this publication going way back, but we also need to lightly lampoon. With the whole crew, theres a bit of a shit-stirring energy. [Image: Gourmet] That spirit is embodied by the new em>Gourmet logo, which is perhaps the furthest image one could image from the publications buttoned-up, cursive font. The design was created by trombonist Zekkereya El-magharbel, who Tatusian discovered after noticing his charmingly off-kilter posters for jazz events in L.A. Each letterform looks almost like it was cut haphazardly from a piece of cardstock, with unexpected bumps, sharp angles, and wonky curves throughout. The process, Tatusian says, was a mix of El-magharbel responding to the prompt and picking up on “the energy of the magazine that we were going formaking something punk and unusual. [Image: Gourmet] The publication’s illustration style, which mimics 19th century motifs, also pokes some lighthearted fun at what Tatusian calls the “hilarious formality of older cooking and food magazines. In one key image at the top of the page, a real vintage line drawing is paired with a slapdash digital rendering of a red soda can. And, as a cheeky so what? to the broader food media landscape, the entire Gourmet site is rendered in what would traditionally be considered an off-putting brown. Its a little bit of a visual joke, in that people in food media are often telling you to put color in a dish when youre styling something or in a photoshoot or on the page, because brown food is unappetizing, its disgusting, blah, blah, blah, Tatusian says. Actually, its not! We eat so much good brown and beige food. [Image: Gourmet] Samadzadeh and Tatusian say they plan on running some image-centric stories in the future, but they dont have a specific aesthetic vision in mind for the publications photographyinstead, theyd rather let contributors bring their own styles to the work. For now, they’re more focused on creating the kind of food content that they’d like to read. We do want them to be beautiful, Tatusian says. It’s not that we want them to be disgusting, but I also think that we’re also interested in how people spend time together around food, and not as much about making an Instagramable product out of all the art that we produce.
Category:
E-Commerce
For professionals looking to moodboard, but sick of juggling Instagram lists and Pinterest boards, Cosmos arrived in 2023 to woo millions of users in an otherwise crowded market. With a pared-back design, and an algorithm trained on a carefully seeded list of creatives, it topped the Design category in the App Store, and the company reports its now used by creative teams at companies including Nike, Apple, and Amazon, who snag over 10 million pieces of content a month from across the internet for their collections. This growth has been enough to raise a $15 million Series A from Matrix Partners, GV, Accel, and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, as the company considers monetization strategies ranging from its premium subscriptions to an upcoming e-commerce play. The platform, despite launching much like Pinterest, will soon be a home for creative portfolios, more like how designers use Instagram and Behance. But as founder Andy McCune charts the companys future, hes openly wrestling with the right ways to employ the latest AI technologies to support the creative communityeven as a sizable chunk of the community says they don’t want it at all. [Image: Cosmos] When to use AI, and when not to Generative AI, of course, is still as controversial as it is inevitablewhile creatives I speak to are adopting it en masse as part of their own process, theres a most certain ick factor among the public to the current wave of AI marketing and the rise of the catchall word of 2025: AI slop. Its very morally and ethically important to me to create a platform that champions the artists and the creatives, says McCune. Now, does that mean that we’re going to be a company that says, AI-generated imagery does not have a place here? Thats not a line that I want to draw. Currently, Cosmos uses machine learning models to identify what it considers high-quality imagery that would appeal to its users tastes, airing that into their feeds. It also uses AI to track and automatically label image provenance. Whereas Instagram is so often a context-less smash-and-grab of other peoples work, Cosmos systems scour the web to figure out what film that compelling frame came from or who took that photo, and tag it appropriately. The company also offers a setting, much like Pinterest, allowing creatives to blur or block all AI content in their feeds. Cosmos shares that 10% of all users have actually opted to block AI contentwhich was higher than they originally anticipated. Very few people customize the settings in any app already, and Cosmos has done nothing to promote that the setting even exists. It was definitely surprising to me, says McCune. And now were having some conversations around like, should that [setting] actually be in the onboarding? At the same time, blocking AI is not a setting he wants to apply by default, even if it would be a way to distinguish Cosmos from its peers. When the setting first launched, it blurred peoples AI contentand that was enough to give its users whiplash. All of a sudden, they went back into their mood boards, and they saw a bunch of their images that they had saved in the past get blurred out. And they’re like, Wait, I didn’t know that I was saving AI images. And that was frustrating to them, McCune notes. They’re like, I feel like I’ve been tricked, right? I think for the end consumer, it’s really important that you have a decision in that process of being able to choose what you see. Why not just block AI? Andy McCune [Image: Cosmos] A big reason that McCune doesnt want to block AI-generated content is that he knows some users want it, and more generally speaking, the design industry at his core will be using more AI tools into the future. Especially as he pivots Cosmos away from mere moodboarding to become someones own creative portfolio, he realizes that blocking AI generated work would block their voicesand their potentially cutting-edge experimentation. I think [AI] will be one medium that people use to express themselves, just like you know, painting is one and digital photography is one, and graphic design is another, says McCune. I think it’s important for us if we really want to be a home for creatives to not pick and choose what mediums we think are holy or not. And yet, there are lines around AI that McCune wont cross because they feel off-mission, and somehow, at odds with his own creative community. I will say that there is a very easy path for us to take right now, which we have not taken, which is to bring Gen AI into the forefront of the product, says McCune. We could have very quickly and very easily built a multibillion-dollar company, if you could just right-click on any image on Cosmos right now and prompt on top of that thing. That’s something that we have not done, because that is not the company that we want to build.
Category:
E-Commerce
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