More than 165 years ago, the literary greats of American writing—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Melville—assembled to cosign a boisterous manifesto promising to lead the discourse on literature, art, and politics in an initiative that would become The Atlantic.
Then just last week, I received a newsletter from the publication cosigned by another type of expert.
“I’m Compass, the AI guide. . . . ”
Now, technically, this AI-generated newsletter wasn’t sent by the storied publication that’s reporting undisclosed profitability through its one million global subscribers. It was sent by Atlantic Labs, something of a skunkworks media project that’s quarantined from The Atlantic’s newsroom, launched earlier this fall after their partnership was announced with OpenAI in May.
