Ian Krietzberg is one of the clearest, most grounded voices covering AI today.
As the AI correspondent at Puck, and former editor-in-chief of The Deep View, Ian approaches artificial intelligence the way a great reporter approaches any powerful system: by following the money, interrogating the incentives, and keeping the human impact front and centre.
At a moment when AI is framed as an inevitable technological destiny or a geopolitical arms race, Ian’s work brings the conversation back to something essential: curiosity, freedom of information, and the people behind the machines.
He also exposes a truth many in creative industries have felt but struggled to articulate: AI is often tested on creatives first because our work is considered “low risk” meaning technically easy to scrape, culturally abundant, and generally low risk.
His newsletter The Hidden Layer traces how decisions made by developers, CEOs, users, and regulators shape the technology we interact with every day.
Our conversation digs into why AI is not a mystical force but a human invention, how media hype distorts our understanding of it, and why the real stakes aren’t in model benchmarks but in the lives touched, changed, and sometimes harmed by these tools.
This is AI reporting with humanity, clarity, and courage.
Links of stuff we talked about…
* The Hidden Layer[Puck]
* The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking [Shannon Vallor]
* Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI[Karen Hao]
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Read more about THE GRAIN at thegrain.ai and get in touch with me at ronit@thegrain.ai. You can also follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.
