AI Is the New Media

I have spent close to thirty years inside the news. I trained as a young reporter at Stabroek News in Georgetown, where the smell of wet newsprint was the smell of the truth arriving. I founded Kaieteur, the newspaper that grew into Guyana's biggest national daily, then started two community papers after I came to Canada. I put a camera on my shoulder and helped bring documentary television to a country that had rarely seen its own face on a screen that way. For years I wrote a column called Ways of Looking and Feeling, because I believed, and still believe, that a medium is never only a delivery van for information. A medium is a way of looking. A medium is a way of feeling.

So I am not a stranger to the death of a medium, or to its birth. I have watched print surrender its throne to television. I have watched television lose the young to the open web. I have watched the web itself break apart into the endless scroll of social feeds. Three turns of the wheel in one career. Each time, the people who owned the old medium swore the new one was a toy, a fad, a vulgarity beneath serious attention. Each time, they were wrong, and the cost of being wrong was the future.

I am telling you the wheel has turned a fourth time. The new medium is artificial intelligence. Not as a tool that helps you make media, but as the medium itself: the place where billions of people now go to ask, to learn, to decide, to be told. AI is the new media. I want to show you why that is literally true, why a Canadian professor saw it coming sixty years ago, and what you must do about it if you have anything to say to the world.

Marshall McLuhan was one of ours, an Edmonton man who became the strangest and most quoted media thinker of the twentieth century. In 1964 he published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and gave the world a sentence that people repeat without believing: the medium is the message. He did not mean it as a riddle. He meant that the content carried by a medium matters far less than the medium itself, because it is the medium that shapes "the scale and form of human association and action." The television show is not the message. Television is the message. The thing that changes us is not what comes through the channel. The thing that changes us is the channel.

We forget this every single time. When print arrived we argued about which books to print. When television arrived we argued about which programmes to broadcast. We fixate on the content because content is loud and visible, while the medium is the water we swim in. McLuhan's whole life was an argument that we were watching the wrong thing.

Watch the right thing now. The content of AI, the essays and pictures and answers it produces, is not the message. The message is that a machine has arrived that every human being can speak to in plain language, that talks back, that holds the world's knowledge in a single calm conversation, and that is already standing between billions of people and reality itself. McLuhan said electronic media would extend the human nervous system across the whole earth and shrink the planet into a "global village," a phrase he first used in 1962. The machine that answers you is the next extension. We have built a village square that replies when you speak to it. That is the message. The rest is just today's content.

Let me give you the numbers, because a newspaperman respects a verifiable fact more than a beautiful theory.

ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users by late February 2026, a figure OpenAI announced itself and TechCrunch reported the same day. Sit with the scale of that. The number of human beings who use one AI service in a single week is now larger than the combined populations of the United States, the European Union, and Canada put together. It crossed from a curiosity into a habit for more people, more quickly, than radio did, than television did, than the web did. Television took decades to reach the world. This took about three years.

It is not one company, and it is not only the chatbot. At its 2026 developer conference, Google reported that its AI Overviews, the AI written summaries that now sit at the top of search results, reach roughly 2.5 billion people every month. Google has around 4.5 billion users in total. More than half of everyone who uses the most used information service on earth now meets an AI answer as a matter of routine. Google's conversational AI Mode crossed a billion monthly users within a year of launch. Its Gemini assistant passed 750 million monthly users. These are not the numbers of an experiment. They are the numbers of a mass medium in full possession of its audience.

Now, I am a journalist, so I will give you the honest counter-number too. When the Reuters Institute at Oxford published its 2025 Digital News Report, surveying nearly 100,000 people across 48 countries, it found that only 7 percent of people use an AI chatbot for news in a given week. Small. But read it the way McLuhan taught us to read a new medium: look at the young. Among people under 25 that figure was 15 percent and climbing, and for the first time the report recorded young people going to ChatGPT and its rivals instead of a search engine, instead of a newspaper. The same report found that in the United States, for the first time, more people now get news from social and video platforms than from television or from news websites. Video based news consumption rose from just over half of people in 2020 to nearly two thirds in 2025. The young always move into the new medium first. They are moving now. The only people who find this surprising are the ones who were surprised by every shift before it.

Here is where McLuhan earns his place in an essay about AI, because every medium has a grain, and the grain quietly rewrites the message.

Print has a grain. It made us private, linear, and argumentative; you read alone, line by line, and you could always go back and check the claim. Television has a grain. It made us emotional and communal and loyal to the image; a nation wept at the same funeral on the same evening. Social media has a grain. It made us fast, fragmented, and tribal, feeding us the world in slivers sorted to keep us scrolling. None of these media simply carried a message. Each one bent the message into its own shape. That bending was the real story, every time.

Artificial intelligence has a grain, and we are only beginning to feel it. The AI medium is conversational, not broadcast. It is personal, not mass, even as it operates at planetary scale; it speaks to you, by name, in a voice tuned to your own question. And above all it synthesizes. It does not hand you ten doorways and let you choose. It gives you the answer, finished, in place.

For five hundred years the logic of media was the doorway. The AI medium points at itself. The doorway has become the room.

Consider one number that ought to stop every writer, every brand, and every institution cold. By 2026, according to analysis from the search firm Semrush, between 92 and 94 percent of sessions in Google's AI Mode ended without a single click to any outside website. For five hundred years the entire logic of media was the doorway. The headline existed to make you turn the page. The search result existed to send you somewhere else. The medium pointed away from itself, toward the source. The AI medium points at itself. It absorbs the sources, digests them, and answers without sending you onward. The doorway has become the room. You no longer travel to the information. The information arrives, already chewed, in the machine's own steady voice.

This is exactly what McLuhan meant by a change in the scale and form of human association. It is not a small thing. It is the difference between a library, which makes you a traveller among many voices, and an oracle, which gives you one. We are trading the library for the oracle, and most people have not noticed they are doing it, because they are still busy arguing about the content.

You do not have to take this from a former newspaperman. Listen to the people who built the machines, speaking on the record.

Sundar Pichai, who runs the company that organized the world's information for a generation, told CBS in 2023 that he had always thought of AI as the most profound technology humanity is working on, "more profound than fire or electricity." Set aside, for now, whether he is right about the ceiling. Notice what he is describing. Not a product, but a force on the scale of the things that remade the species. Fire and electricity were not features. They were new conditions for human life. He is telling you, in the plainest words a chief executive can use, that this is a medium of that order.

And Jensen Huang, whose company makes the engines the whole field runs on, said it most usefully of all at his 2023 keynote in Taipei: "Everyone is a programmer now." He meant that the language of the new machine is not code. The language is human. You speak, and it builds. Hold that against the history of media for a moment. The printing press needed a guild and a press. The radio station and the television channel needed a tower, a transmitter, a licence, and the blessing of a government. Producing media, real media that could reach a crowd, was for centuries the privilege of the few who owned the expensive machine. The new medium asks for none of that. It asks for a sentence, written clearly. The cost of producing media has fallen to the cost of knowing what you want to say.

That single fact is the opportunity of our lifetime, and it is the rest of this essay.

I have given the better part of my life to media, and I have buried more than one medium I loved. I do not mourn them. A medium is a way of looking and a way of feeling, and when a truer, wider, more human way of looking arrives, the honest thing is to walk toward it, not to stand guard over the ruins of the old one.

The machine that answers when you speak to it is the widest medium the human race has ever built, and it has handed the power to reach the world to anyone with a clear voice and something true to say. For most of history that power belonged to whoever owned the press, the tower, the channel. Now it belongs to you. The medium is the message, and the message of this medium is that the gate is finally open.

So speak. Author your future, and help others author theirs. The new medium is listening, and for the first time, so is the world.

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