{"id":3745,"date":"2026-07-16T14:37:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T14:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=3745"},"modified":"2026-07-16T14:37:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T14:37:33","slug":"peter-thiels-ai-tribunal-put-journalists-on-trial-now-its-pivoted-to-scoreboard-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=3745","title":{"rendered":"Peter Thiel\u2019s AI Tribunal Put Journalists on Trial. Now It\u2019s Pivoted to Scoreboard Model"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<!-- do not apply CSS styles to this element! --><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>\n\tObjection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel\u2019s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=3744\">Jon Bernthal on \u2018Odyssey\u2019 Battles, Counseling Spider-Man and Always Going Big: \u201cEmbarrass the F*** Out of Yourself\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n\tObjection\u2019s CEO is Aron D\u2019Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the \u201csteroid Olympics,\u201d who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel\u2019s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan\u2019s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tObjection\u2019s first tribunal, in April, targeted <em>The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D\u2019Souza told <em>THR<\/em> that \u201cmany journalists are more powerful than billionaires,\u201d explaining, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tD\u2019Souza and Objection\u2019s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot \u2014 who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018 \u00a0\u2014 acknowledged they\u2019d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn\u2019t be accused of outputting slop justice. \u201cThe AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,\u201d D\u2019Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in <em>THR<\/em>\u2018s tribunal.)<\/p>\n<p>\n\tD\u2019Souza and Grant-Talbot since arrived at a solution for their quandary by determining, as Objection\u2019s home page now reads in AI-cadenced English, that \u201cverdicts punish failure. They don\u2019t fix the incentive. They do not solve the root cause.\u201d Ergo: The Primary, \u201ca robust public methodology that scores, ranks and indexes journalists on the rigor of their reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe company\u2019s founders , as well as the metrics they\u2019ve determined that their AI model should weigh to determine journalistic credibility \u2014 a balance of factors including source attribution, coverage tone and right of reply. The Primary ranks outlets as well as individual journalists.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tD\u2019Souza elaborated on Objection\u2019s transformation into The Primary in an email he sent to <em>THR<\/em> on July 15.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=3742\">How Paramount May Fight an Onslaught of Lawsuits Over Its Warner Bros. Deal<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n\t\u201cThis is less of a pivot than it looks from outside,\u201d his note began. \u201cThe question I\u2019ve been chasing since I ran the litigation strategy against Gawker more than a decade ago is how journalism gets evaluated at all. Markets reward attention. Awards recognise a tiny fraction of the work. For the individual reporter, between those two, nothing. Objection was one attempt at that question \u2014 the enforcement attempt. Primary is the second attempt at the same question, and I think it\u2019s the right one. What moved it from an idea to something urgent was watching it happen to me. Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch interviewed me this spring and published it in full. Within hours, AI systems had read it, compressed it, and were serving it onward. The reporter did the work. The machine took the value. That\u2019s the economics of journalism in a single afternoon \u2014 and no arbitration process repairs it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tD\u2019Souza described The Primary\u2019s business as \u201cpre-revenue\u201d \u2014 its revenue generation model \u201cis a decision in front of us\u201d \u2014 and pushed back on the notion that Objection simply couldn\u2019t build a trustworthy system of adjudication it felt it could stand behind. (Or, at least, one which would satisfy its paying clients.) \u201cThe tribunal worked,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThat\u2019s not spin; it\u2019s precisely why we moved. What we learned is that a verdict is an enforcement instrument, and enforcement only changes behaviour at the margin of getting caught. It arrives after the damage, in the small number of cases where someone has the resources and the appetite to file. It has nothing to say to the overwhelming majority of reporting, which nobody objects to. Every case we ran pointed at the same thing underneath, and it wasn\u2019t bad journalists \u2014 it was that the discipline behind a story has never been measured at the level of the reporter who wrote it, and what isn\u2019t measured doesn\u2019t get paid for. You can\u2019t litigate your way to a fix for that. You have to build the instrument that\u2019s missing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tSo far, Jeff Bezos\u2019 <em>The Washington Post <\/em>and David Ellison\u2019s CBS News lead the rankings at The Primary from a small initial indexed pool, with the <em>Daily Mail<\/em> tabloid receiving by far the lowest aggregate score. A group of Reuters reporters hold the top spots among individuals \u2014 led by Rajesh Kumar Singh, its correspondent covering U.S. aviation. Among the prominent writers with the lowest scores are columnists Cindy Adams of the <em>New York Post<\/em> and Mark Halperin of the <em>Daily Mail<\/em>, as well as A.I. beat journalists Mike Isaacs and Cade Metz at <em>The New York Times<\/em>. (<em>THR<\/em> and its staff have yet to be ranked.)<\/p>\n<p>\n\tD\u2019Souza insisted to <em>THR <\/em>that The Primary\u2019s scorecard will have a salutary effect on journalism. \u201cA reporter who\u2019s spent fifteen years doing the slower, harder, better-sourced work has never had a portable, public record proving it \u2014 something they can carry to an editor, a proprietor, or a competitor,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNow they do. That\u2019s how incentives move: not by shaming anyone, but by making the alternative legible enough that someone can finally pay for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe Primary isn\u2019t the first to establish itself as a watchdog for the watchdogs. Two decades ago, there was the launch of the non-profit NewsTrust, which saw staffers rate stories. Then, in 2016, came automated browser extension The Factual, followed three years later by Credder, a self-styled attempt to be the Rotten Tomatoes of journalism. None remain in operation.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=3740\">TIFF Film Market Unveils Eight Projects for First Innovation Hub<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rebranded as The Primary, the service ranks media outlets and reporters and has given The New York Times&#039; A.I. beat among the lowest scores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,1696],"class_list":["post-3745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting","tag-ai","tag-peter-thiel"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Peter Thiel\u2019s AI Tribunal Put Journalists on Trial. 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