Jon Christian

Hi, I'm Jon! Welcome to my website.

Professionally, I'm the executive editor for Futurism, an award-winning blog about technology and the future.

On a broad level, a lot of my work is about how information moves through society, and how that flow is affected by platforms, power, and money.

More specifically, for the last few years I've been fascinated by the rise of AI, especially how it's being deployed by tech corporations and the media, and what it means for the future of society.

Here are a few of my favorite projects I've worked on over the years:

• Soon after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, my Futurism colleague Frank Landymore reported that the tech news site CNET had started quietly publishing entire personal finance articles produced by AI. I was intrigued, so I kept digging and found that the AI articles were riddled with factual errors and plagiarism, prompting CNET to suspend the program and its staff to unionize. (Futurism's reporting picked up substantial public interest, with the Washington Post calling CNET's use of AI a "journalistic disaster.")

• One of my favorite stories I've edited at Futurism was by my colleague Maggie Harrison Dupré, who discovered that a significant number of commerce articles published by the magazine Sports Illustrated were bylined by nonexistent writers with fictional author bios and AI-generated profile pictures. Sports Illustrated deleted all the articles in a huff, and in a fantastic followup piece, Maggie conducted a deep into the AI startup that it had hired to create the fake writers, as well as its work for other publications ranging from USA Today to the Miami Herald. (Maggie went on to win a 2024 Mirror Award for her work on this topic.)

• Another project I was thrilled to work on at Futurism was by my colleague Victor Tangermann, who's documented the rise of "influencer" accounts on social media that are fully AI-generated, as well as talking to their creators and exploring the nefarious side of the phenomenon.

• AI has been misbehaving since long before ChatGPT. Back in 2018, I broke a story for Vice about behavior by Google Translate that was so strange that it sounded fictional: when you entered nonsensical strings of characters into the service, it was spitting out ominous-sounding religious prophecies. (There was a perfectly reasonable explanation, it turned out, that presaged a lot more peculiar AI behavior we've seen since.)

• My first story for Wired tackled something I'd always wondered about since getting my first smartphone: why would autocomplete push you toward some words and away from others, like a certain obscenity that always corrected to "ducking"? I dug through the Android source code and found that Google maintained a list of which exact words were verboten -- and it was a very strange list!

• A story I did for the Outline -- rest in peace, because it's now defunct -- made a lot of people in the publishing industry very angry. Basically, that was an era when a lot of legacy outlets like Forbes and Fast Company had moved to a model in which they churned out large numbers of articles by unpaid freelance contributors -- and as I found, a lot of them were secretly taking payments from marketing agencies to write flattering, fluffy pieces about their clients.

• I've also covered super-detailed medical mannequins for surgeons to practice operations on, crowdsourced advice columns, how memes spread through society, artisanal catnip, the horrors of corporate archiveship, the maker community, and much more.

I occasionally do things other than work, too! I also have various hobbies like pinball, horror movies, and audio production.

The best place to hang out or follow what I'm working on is my account on Bluesky.

And feel free to drop me a line: jonathan (dot) a (dot) christian (at) gmail (dot) com.

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